So…Abumrad is looking for that third space where revelation and resolution exist. Hmmm. Not seeing much of that with Trump.
The Flying Saucer Secret
The flying saucer is a popular culture standard with every public library featuring a shelf filled with “UFO” books. What is not widely known is a secret project featuring a spaceship with a giant solid metal disc as an engine was underway over half a century ago, with small test models actually flown. This working flying saucer was conceived in 1946 by the eccentric genius Stanislaw Ulam. The propulsion system was first proposed in writing in 1947, the same year as the first modern saucer sighting and the Roswell incident. But before the conspiracy starts it must be understood this real flying saucer used nuclear bombs to push it through space and so was not something sighted cruising the skies of Earth. Ulam had studied the problem of space flight and his solution was a monolithic alloy disc accelerated by plasma generated using the highly energetic release of nuclear energy. His reasoning was, since it is difficult keeping even a chemical rocket engine from melting, trying to contain a reaction one million times more powerful in the same way would be a dead end. He realized an “engine” with no internal combustion but instead using a completely external nuclear reaction would have vastly better performance. With no moving parts. Ulam was not thinking outside the box, he threw the box away. Capable of flying at fantastic speeds and exploring the outer planets, this system was eventually patented by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in 1959. Freeman Dyson did the original work.
The main problem with this real flying saucer then and now are the radioactive byproducts produced by the propulsion system. Nuclear Pulse Propulsion (NPP) is safely used only outside the magnetic field surrounding the Earth. While chemical rockets can send small spacecraft Beyond Earth Orbit (BEO) the smallest efficient disk for a pulse system would mass several hundred tons. Super Heavy Lift Vehicles (SHLV) like the mighty Saturn V would be developed and could carry sections into space for assembly but subsequent events in the early 60’s halted work on pulse propulsion. The 1967 Apollo 1 fire then made it clear to aerospace concerns that sending humans into deep space would be hard money. Cold war projects offered higher profit margins and this drove industry to the easy money. The budget for space exploration in the 70’s was drastically reduced and the Saturn V was discontinued in favor of an inferior lift Space Shuttle pitched as paying for itself.
The concept of a massive alloy disc as a spaceship engine was put on hold from the date of the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963. Two decades after the end of the project Reagan’s Star Wars would begin and run for another ten years with interesting results. The directed energy weapons (bomb-pumped X-ray lasers) studied in the Strategic Defense Initiative were exactly the right devices needed to superheat and efficiently project a plasma cloud onto a pulse propulsion disc. Ironically, far more progress was thus made, and far more money spent, perfecting the flying saucer decades after the project was canceled. Experiments done covertly under the guise of fusion reactor research also provided data enabling this channeling of nuclear plasma in one direction.
Pulse propulsion ideally transmutes a slug of matter, most likely water or plastic, into a super-heated super high speed jet of plasma. The end goal is to repeatedly accelerate a multi-thousand ton disc and payload through space somewhat like a aircraft catapulted off the deck of an aircraft carrier. The still classified secrets of star wars hold the secret to making flying saucers capable of flying to the limits of the solar system and back with mission times of a few years.
The minimum diameter and mass of the flying saucer is the critical factor and is determined by the efficiency of the nuclear device and how narrowly the plasma cloud is directed at the disc. Minimum device size and directional numbers are highly classified but a disc could possibly be launched in sections on SHLVs for assembly in Low Lunar Orbit (LLO) outside the magnetosphere. It is more likely a truly efficient disk with an Isp exceeding 100,000 seconds would be close to a thousand feet in diameter and be quite massive. In this case the Moon becomes the place to fabricate the discs using In Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU), probably in lava tube factories. Super-efficient giant discs become possible with lunar ISRU and these spaceships could lift immense payloads off the lunar surface.
In the interim of the half a century required to build lunar factories able to fabricate discs (and lunar power plants providing fissile U-233 from thorium) there are a number of options. The most promising path is the 1994 Medusa nuclear sail concept of Johndale Solem. This is the “soft” version of Nuclear Pulse Propulsion and would be less durable and likely limited in payload. Such spaceships would not use flying saucer discs but instead resemble giant parachutes- referred to as “spinnakers” by Solem. The Medusa spaceship requires small pulse units (bombs) and extremely strong and refractory materials for the spinnaker. The main predictor of the mass of such a spaceship surfaced in 2006 in a popular article published by radiation expert Eugene Parker. “Shielding Space Travelers” detailed the 14 foot thick cosmic ray water shield required for human deep space missions and this will likely determine Medusa’s practical limits for crew and payload.
Pulse units are the key to pulse propulsion and there is no shortage of the necessary fissile materials. Estimates for the amount of fissile material required to build a nuclear device are two, four, and nine kilograms, or as little as 4.5 pounds to 9 pounds for plutonium, to around 20 pounds for uranium. The official “weapon equivalent” amount used by international agreement is 25 kilograms of uranium per warhead (about double the unofficial estimate). Not counting material actually in weapons there are approximately 55,000 of these equivalents stockpiled worldwide and this works out to around 110,000 “unofficial” pulse units using uranium. Plutonium is a little more complicated with 3 kilograms enriched or 5 kilograms of reactor grade counted as equivalents and 130,000 in this global stockpile with a .5 unofficial factor working out to around 200,000. As well as these equivalent stockpiles, enough material in the over 400 operating reactor facilities worldwide could be reprocessed and enriched on short notice for a possible total of up to half a million pulse units. At two thousand pulse units per mission there is enough fissile material on hand to launch two hundred missions to the outer solar system. With a shuttle-sized fleet of five spaceships each going on a mission every four years using just the existing stockpile would enable missions for the rest of this century.
To approach the 100,000 mph plus speeds needed to make a three to five year two-way mission to the outer solar system possible a minimum of approximately three thousand pulse units would be required. This is using a 100 mph average acceleration per pulse unit. A pulse unit would contain around 120 gallons of water or that volume of plastic and might resemble two stacked 50 gallon drums. A standard 20 foot long shipping container will hold 88 drums stacked. This gives some idea of the pulse unit space requirements for a mission: approximately forty standard 20 foot long shipping containers massing something over 1000 tons. There are various profiles that use braking in the atmosphere of one of the gas or ice giants and then landing on an icy moon and using ISRU to fill the pulse units and also draining water from the spaceship radiation shield for the final deceleration back into lunar orbit at the end of the mission. Using collapsible slug containers these profiles would reduce pulse unit mass.
The flying saucer “secret” is there is no other path to Human Space Flight Beyond Earth and Lunar Orbit (HSF-BELO).
Ice on the Moon 