How it lived so long

Going to have to stop commenting on SpaceNews. I have a bad feeling about the comments I am getting. One sociopathic MAGA-Musk troll is implying someone should kill me by writing:

David to Endymion
If it were to act like this in day to day life, one would have wonder how it lived so long.

At the moment, Trumpism and the Musk cult is melting down and there is a slim chance that one of the half a dozen fanboys that have been cyberstalking me for years just might decide to make their life meaningful and show up on my doorstep. They never stopped me for very long in the over 15 years I have been criticizing the NewSpace Mob…but this does not feel right. It is fitting that it should end commenting about a billionaire promoting space solar power.

Comment reply on SpaceNews:

I did not get anything wrong.

Maintaining a fission nuke in cold shutdown through a launch accident isn’t particularly difficult.

If you think nuclear material contamination after a reactor is blown to pieces is not a big deal then you have a very different worldview than the rest of humankind.

-sometimes you want a lot of delta-v and a lot of acceleration. Giant chemical stages can provide the former, but not the latter.

Again….nuclear thermal, using a reaction, literally, a million times more powerful than chemicals, provides an Isp only about twice that of a chemical rocket and only using the most difficult to store cryogenic propellant. It is an order of magnitude more expensive than chemical propulsion while delivering far less improvement.

-zero boiloff hydrogen. They could obviously fail to deliver, but somebody thinks this is a problem that’s solvable long before an NTP would be ready to go.

What does “solvable” mean? What do you think will be solved?

Nope, still wrong. I agree that it’s impossible to insert fuel. But you’d never do that. That’s what control systems are for.

You can say I am “still wrong” but I am not. You do not want to launch fissionables with fuel loaded in the engine and inserting that fuel in space makes the design much more complex. If you are inferring that humans would manually insert the fuel then what you are doing is actually identifying the problem of how to get the fuel out of the safe transport into space after launch and into the engine. See how that works?

DoD wants systems with a lot of delta-v that are nimble enough to dodge and outrun kinetic attacks in deep space.

You can’t just light off a nuclear reactor like a rocket engine and, again, storing the liquid hydrogen for long periods works against “nimble.” The DOD is not going to get “what they want” with a nuclear reactor super-heating liquid hydrogen.

NTP has the huge advantage that the hot stuff mostly goes out the nozzle.

Actually….that is absurd. The huge disadvantage is that it is hard enough keeping a chemical rocket engine from melting and a bastard combination of a nuclear reactor and a rocket engine is far more difficult to keep from blowing up and why it has such a pathetically low performance using, again, a reaction a million times more powerful than chemicals.

This was the genius of the genius of Stanislaw Ulam, who considered nuclear pulse propulsion his greatest work. Ulam thought outside the box, throwing the box away and envisioning a way to use nuclear energy without having to try and confine it. If a bomb fails to go off in Nuclear Pulse Propulsion then you go to the next bomb. If you melt a hole in your Nuclear Thermal Rocket you will likely die in space.