Nuke rocket concepts

Alpha-Tech YouTube

You can breed Thorium in space, and then use it for your nuclear thermal energy. Seeding it into some molten salts will keep it under control, as per demonstrations done at Oak Ridge decades ago. But those in Oak Ridge were not for rockets, but possibly for airplanes.

The use of ammonia seems interesting. I would wonder about how to get the most out of it.

The concepts below aren't the only ones. There are many ways to do the same thing. The need is for a definite plan, and then to execute it.

Part II: The initial unmanned landings

Given what the previous post says, the first Starships will be unmanned, and will be equipped with semi-autonomous robots.

These bots must build out a habitat that the first humans can actually live in. That would opposed to dying in the ships, because the ships are not a place where they'd like to live for the rest of their lives.

Preferably, it would employ the strategy of in-situ resourcing. So, how does this get accomplished? Let's start with the Starships themselves. They each have a lot of interior room, but what if you want much more? You'd have to build something on the surface of Mars, and that means you don't have a lot of materials or machines to work with.

We could still use the Starships. How? Let's keep in mind that Musk wants to bring 1000 ships into service. Therefore, he can spare a bunch for this idea. That idea would be to use the Starships to build out a large space for humans to live in. How many? Let's say less than hundred of them could be used in-situ to make an enclosed area as tall as a Starship, and as thick as its diameter. The Starships would be placed around a circle that would be almost 600 feet in diameter. This would enclose an area of 50k square feet and about 150 feet tall. You can make a super large enclosed structure out of these things. But it would need a roof.

It would also need to have the gaps filled in so that it could be pressurized. It may be a challenge to get a roof on top of it. A blimp like structure that could be inflated could go over the top of the structure, and be attached to it. All gaps would be filled in, and the structure could then be pressurized.

A procedure could be employed that would allow this to be accomplished with as much speed as could be brought to bear. A number of Starships would have to be scrapped and used as metal to fill in the gaps. No more than 40 Starships could be scrapped to fill in the gaps on the outside and inside.

For good measure, an inner liner could go on the inside so that there would definitely not be any leaks.

Over time, the structure could be modified so as to improve its durability and longetivity. Once the interior is built out, then interior could be built out next. You could scavenge the remains of the Starships used for a substantial amount of metal that could used in order to complete the task.

In summary, a hundred Starships could be employed to do the job of adding millions of square feet of potential floorspace for a megabuilding the size of a sports stadium on Earth, but with many floors. It could be built out inside with materials obtained from the Martian environment. Bots could do the work before any people arrived.

A single Starship on Mars.  I forgot about the control surfaces.  They won't fit together tightly, so they'll have to be removed first.  That would complicate things a bit.

Musk's first manned missions to Mars

This post is made without the benefit of any inside knowledge about Elon Musk's plans.

In fact, it is being made without studying over his talks all that much. It is mostly speculation about his approach that isn't being talked about. Also that, it is one that some folks that haven't grasped one important point. That is this: the first settlers won't be coming back home at the earliest launch window to Earth. There is a strong possibility that they won't come back at all.

This wouldn't necessarily be a failure. It is an intention. The problem that Musk is trying to solve will be such that there cannot be a return trip, because this will impose a requirement that will complicate the process of creating a permanent presence there.

As it is being pointed out in some quarters, the need to return back will be a huge effort in itself. The removal of that as a goal will simplify their task. It will be enough for these settlers to survive for at least two launch windows on Mars. By that time, the will be so acclimated to space that the return back to Earth may be impossible physically.

For five years away from Earth will change their bodies permanently. That is, if they survive that long.

A return trip to Earth would entail a much faster ship. If it could be done with enough speed, it could be done within one launch window. This will necessitate completely different launch parameters.

So a return trip home is not going to be feasible. But a trip there in order to stay will be feasible. Or at least, more feasible.

If there's not going to be a return trip, and there will be unmanned trips, what will those first trips be like?

He will be sending his robots there to look for resources. A water source will be needed. Besides that, shelter will be needed. Living in a rocket for months at a time is enough. They need some shelter outside their spacecraft.

The first shelters may be included on the unmanned ships. The robots will set up the shelters. Those shelters will need plenty of radiation shielding.

The settlers will need to able to breathe. Some machinery will be needed to produce oxygen for breathing.

There will be a need to detoxify their immediate environment. Mars has a lot of perchlorates in its regolith. These could find their way into their living space. These will have to be removed.

Mars is very cold. There will be a need for a heat source.

The list is long. A lot of ground work will be done in this first mission. The work may not be finished before the first humans arrive. It will be a race to finish the work before the newcomers die off.

It won't be easy. In fact, it may take several attempts to get people to survive long enough to keep the enterprise going. Something to think about, eh?

With respect to solving the world's biggest problems ( by using AI)

Quote:

"An amazing future, as long as it doesn't destroy us first"

Veritasium YouTube

 

 

February 10, 2025 Quick space links

Behind the Black blog

Of these, one stands out for a post on this here speculative blog, maties.

 

There's one about high energy particles trapped in the Earth's orbit.  My speculation is in the form of a question:  Can these be mined in any significant way, such that it can be a source of water?

 

Re-purposing old aircraft carriers for launching and recovering Starships.

 

This is an interesting speculation, but not by ME. So, I'll embed it here on me speculative blog, maties.

 

Aircraft carriers are frickin' HUGE. They also stand tall above the water. Perhaps he could fasten a catch mechanism at the end of the deck, and off the side. It's tall enough to clear the water. The flames from the rocket would hit the ocean water, and just steam back up. No need to use water, cuz it's all around.

 

The retired one they are talking about is diesel powered. The nuclear powered Nimitz class carriers are getting old, so that may be a possibility in the future. Imagine using the nuclear power units to make methane out of sea water. Then, they could be self-sufficient in terms of fueling their ships.

 

 

 

 

 

The first few landings on Mars could be different

If the first few landings of Mars involves machines and not people, then that will mean that those Starships are expendable. More cargo capacity could mean that a different landing approach could be employed. Why would you need the mostly empty Starship with all those engines and fuel tanks?

The Starship's lower sections could be jettisoned, which means less mass to soft land. That means less fuel, and less powerful engines. If the idea is to land 150 tons, with a gravity well of less than 40% of Earth's, then you'd need somewhere above 60 tons thrust to set the rump Starship down gently on Mars.

A battery of SuperDracos could the job.

The fact is, I don't really like the idea of landing the Starship in the manner in which the current plan envisages. Neither do some other folks who comment upon Musk's plans. There is a suggestion for a smaller lander, but to enclose a smaller lander would make the concept less efficient. Therefore, the idea for ditching the main engines and tanks before the final approach to landing.

The current plan has already been tested on Earth. The final flip maneuver preceeds the restart of the Raptors, with the final burn down to the landing. I say that the flip could be kept, but the Raptors could be ditched, with a brief burn to get the jettisoned part out of harm's way. The SuperDracos could take over to set the ship down on the surface.

Perhaps more than 150 tons could be landed. Future manned ships could keep the flip maneuver with an entire ship setting down. The first few manned ships would be not be prepared for returning either, so a different landing technique could be prepared for that too. Perhaps the same maneuver!

If there's some infrastructure already built up, then it wouldn't be necessary to keep the lower portion of the ship anyway.

The biggest icebergs in the world

 

Are as big as some small countries. They may exist for a few years before they break apart. In the spirit of what I mentioned just recently, if you were to melt these things for water, and then send the water to areas such as Southern California, you just might be able to do it profitably. Maybe. Or maybe I don't know what the hell I'm talking about.

 

If you cannot do this, then what sense does it make to go to Mars?

 

 

Elon Musk's 66 Trillion Dollar Plan for Mars

He doesn't even need to mine Terbinium in order to pay for it.

What happens when AI knows too much?

 

Beeyond Ideas YouTube

 

Summary: Unraveling the consequences of rapid AI growth. Reaction: My hunch is that it won't happen quite the way this video says.

 

 

 

 

What resource does Greenland have that we could use?

7:23 AM:

Water

The climate doomers say that if Greenland were to melt, it would raise the level of the oceans. Why not put all of that melted ice ( aka "water") to good use? It sure seems like it could come in handy in some places, like Collyfornia.

How to do all that? Well, if you can mine the North Slope of Alaska for oil, then you can move a crap load of ice off that giant ice sheet. Melt it down, or just load it up on tankers and cruise on down to the good ol' US of A. By the time the tanker got there, the ice should be melted. Pump it out, and send it to those empty reservoirs in Collyfornia. Maybe they could put out a few fires, or something.

You can move a lot of mass with supertankers. It says that each of those things can move 550k tons at a time. That's mucho agua, senor. The cost? To move it about 2 or 3 cents per gallon. You could bottle it and sell it for a profit at that price.

8:52 AM: A supertanker can hold 500k tons, which is enough to fill the empty reservoir near the Palisades fire near L.A.

Tiny home

Would you live in one, he asks. Shoot, I lived in a travel trailer for 7 plus years. It wasn't this big.

Testing Amazon's 3 cheapest welders

Still got that 5'x8' trailer, which I could possibly use on a trip way out to yonder and back. The idea is to make it portable. There would be some welds of attach points for some boards to install at the destination. Putting it all together on site and then taking it back down when departing.

Making it portable would also make it easier to move around. I don't like the idea of putting a trailer together and then finding out that it can't take the trip.

Besides, a trailer like this needs some welding done to it anyway. Just never got around to it. Besides, I never did welding before, so I wonder what kind of job I'd do. Probably not the best, as this tends to be the pattern.

About that proposed proposition of propulsion that I keep popping off about

12/28/24:  

A study of their propulsion concept looks like a modified version of the 50's Orion concept. The anti-matter would be used to induce a mini-nuke explosion, which would propel the craft to high delta-v with high isp. The isp might be in the range of a half-million of so. This would be sufficient in order to make the solar system much more accessible.

 

The advantage would be in not having to use enriched uranium nor plutonium. Non-critical materials could be used instead. That may make the whole project more palatable to the nervous Nellie crowd.

 

12/26/24:

 

If I am not mistaken, it may well have been possible to develop this tech back in 2007, when this report was written. However, one generation has passed, and it has not been done. There is an opportunity to do it now, but will that opportunity be utilized? After all, there may not be unlimited opportunities. If not this time, it may never be done. That's should sober up some folks, at least. Anyway, what is lacking is the will to do it.  It may well be now or never.

 

12/25/24:

 

Muon-catalyzed fusion propulsion written up previously on the main blog.

 

The fly-in-the-ointment is getting those muons. But you can get all the muons you need if you had anti-matter cheap. Ah, that's the rub. You've got to get the anti-matter. You can make anti-matter in the lab, but that way is too expensive, don't you know. Anti-matter from the Van Allen Belts of Earth would be a lot cheaper, but you need advances in other fields first. One of the those fields is affordable heavy launch. Elon Musk is about to solve that particular problem. There's advances needed in high-temperature super-conductors for the plasma trap envisioned, which would hold the anti-matter together so it won't go "boom". Plus something about that trap has to be invented too.

 

If you can get to that point, you'd have your source of cheap anti-matter. Then you'd need to go to Saturn, where there's gobs of the stuff. Enough to run your spacecraft and about any other thing you can imagine. Plus you can make things go boom.

 

 

The Fly in the Ointment argument against anti-matter propulsion

There's always a "but", isn't there

The stuff you need for this kind of rocket doesn't exist yet. It has to be invented. The fly in the ointment is the chicken and the egg too. If there's no bucks, there's no Buck Rogers.

The problem is that the Luddites have managed to convince us that economic growth is bad. It's called "Limits to Growth". It grew into the so-called environmentalism that has choked off economic growth in the West, and encouraged it to take place in the East.

In other words, the communists did it. We let the commies talk us into sabotaging our own economies. They'll lie about politics being downstream from culture, but amongst themselves they tout the reverse, which is described by Gramscii. Gramscii held that if the commies grabbed all of the high ground of the culture, they can seize the power. And so they have.

The cure is to take it back. But the fly in that particular ointment is that you can vote your way into communism, but you'll have to shoot your way out.

The issue hasn't been decided too much in favor of the commies yet. But they are really close. We have but a few years to turn this around.

Quick and dirty analysis of the anti-matter concept of rocket propulsion

This analysis, if it could be called such, will look at only the potential advantage of this approach. In particular, the economic advantage from the standpoint of the rocket propulsion itself.

 

It should be obvious, and therefore unnecessary to point out just one thing: Any method that could deliver 100 km/sec of delta-v has got to be a big advantage over anything else.

 

For comparison, a Starship Superheavy can deliver 200 tons to low Earth orbit. Therefore, to put 200 tons in low earth orbit is one launch. In order for that same rocket to be refueled for any mission elsewhere would take 10 more launches for the refill. Therefore, each Superheavy launch would cost 11 Superheavy launches to attain 200 tons at Low Earth Orbit, with a capability to go elsewhere.

 

For an anti-matter rocket, assuming you already had the fuel, you could get 100 km/sec. That's a lot more bang for the buck. To make the comparision as fair as possible, assuming that you had the fuel from Earth to refill the Starship, it would take 10 launches from the ground. Each launch from the ground would deliver 1 km/sec of delta-v. Therefore, the anti-matter option is 100 times better.

 

If you take that out to Saturn with that 100 km/sec, which is possible, then you could return with enough anti-matter for 10 more Saturn launches. Therefore, it could be leveraged into a method that would ultimately prove to be 10,000 times better than with a chemical rocket.

 

Even if Starship could bring launches down to a million apiece, it would save 100 billion dollars in launch costs just for one round-trip Saturn anti-matter run. You could make many, many such runs. Therefore, there is no comparison at all with anti-matter. It's a no-brainer. Come to think of it, if one would count the 10 launches to get to orbit, the savings would be a cool $1 trillion for each round trip to Saturn!

Zorin OS problem is a case of bad magic

12/23/24:

 

 

 

 

After attempting a fix that didn't work, I am forced to conclude that the current Zorin OS installation has gone kaputski. May it rest in peace. Or whatever.

 

 

 

 

12/22/24:

 

 

 

 

Trying to trace down this error mess, and this is all I got so far. It is bad magic. Hmm, is there a good magic? Or is it just magic?

If gathering gases from the upper atmosphere doesn't work...

Maybe they could point it towards a spacecraft to get above Low Earth Orbit. The idea here is to get high ISP and high thrust directed at a spacecraft in order to increase useful mass fraction.

It would work on similar principles as the nuclear thermal, but instead of nukes doing the work, a solar thermal solution is employed instead. This would be a variation on the Parkins device.

A solar collector as described in an earlier post would supply the energy. It would focus the energy on an aeroshell, which would get heated up to high temperatures. Liquid hydrogen would be used to keep the aeroshell from melting, and the heated hydrogen would be used as the reaction mass.

An ISP of a thousand seconds would reduce the amount of fuel needed. Compared to a hypergolic engine used in Apollo the mass fraction might well be tripled.

If a fast transit to Mars is desired, then one can post it at a LaGrange point, and have to accelerate the spacecraft to Mars at a high velocity. Perhaps it would get there in 45 days.

The spacecraft could be kept light, so the amount of fuel would needed would not be excessive. However, you'd need to slow down once you got there. Therefore, post another one at one of the Martian moons that would slow down the spacecraft once it got there.

The idea here is really to use the sun as the energy source as opposed to onboard fuel. You'd need a series of "stations" that would boost the spacecraft up from low orbit, and from there to interplanetary destinations. At the destination, you could have a station that would help the craft slow down in the same manner-- a retro rocket type deceleration maneuver.

 

Obama himself said that space has to have an economic basis to it

Hence there has to be an economic rationale for its existence.

Is that possible?

Just carrying forward a bit on my peregrinations on the subject of Lox-Leo.

The latest is about the economics of it. If the economics doesn't make sense, then it won't be done. So how does these economics work?

I'm looking at it in terms of how many launches from the ground that it will make unnecessary. It looks like Starship will need about 10 launches for re-fueling, so that it can go to places beyond low Earth orbit.

If you can reduce that number significantly, then Lox-Leo would at least make more sense that launching from the ground.

Other questions need to be answered though. How much does it take to service these facilities? If it doesn't net out positive, then it doesn't make sense. I don't have some numbers to toss around. There's this one number that might be handy. That number is the number of pounds of thrust that can be generated per MW of beamed energy from GEO. This will determine how much of a facility will be needed to generate the energy.

I think it is 50 pounds per MW. But that could be wrong. If it is correct, let's say that 12k lbs of thrust are needed. I got that number from what the OMS thrusters on the Shuttle needed in order to finish its ascent into orbit. The main engines were good for 98% of orbital velocity. The OMS thrusters had to do the rest.

If memory serves, the Shuttle massed out at 200k lbs. Let's assume that the lox-leo device masses out at that. In order to maintain orbit, you may need 12k lbs of thrust.

To generate 12k of thrust, then you need some multiple of MW of 50 MW increments in order to do the trick. That would be 12000/50 equals 240 MW.

Something less than 1 sq mile of solar panels might do the trick.  You'd have to figure the upkeep of these massive structure in the calculations.  (Not done here.)

It would have to be converted to an energy source to beam to the collecting vessel so as to maintain 12k of thrust for whatever amount of time is needed in order to maintain orbital velocity.

Once you know that, then perhaps you can calculate how much you can collect before having a full tank. This may require even more energy. Indeed, you may even have to count on that. ----12:58 PM, 12/14/24:



7:43 PM:



The 50 MW part is correct, according the source I was thinking about. ( The Nuclear Rocket )

Some reading of this Wikipedia source would seem to indicate that whatever gases found up there may not be what is down at sea level. Hmmm. This may not work like I thought it might. There's a lot of sodium up there!

Instead of space solar on the ground, use it to power other spacecraft from geostationary orbit

 

Consider this space-solar type proposition studied in the late 70's:

 

 

It would consist of a large collector, some 38 sq. miles in area, covered with photovoltaic cells....

 

it would convert solar into microwave power for transmission to rectennas on Earth. The rectennas would re-convert the energy back into electricity that would go into the grid...

 

Such a satellite would mass out at 100,000 tons, and produce 10 Gigawatt of power continuously. It would orbit at a geostationary orbit some 22k miles above earth.

 

 

A few observations here: 1) The collectors are too large. It would take a lot of resources to monitor and service these massive satellites. 2) 10 Gigawatts is a lot of power. That would be the equivalent of several Hoover Dams. 3) 100,000 tons is a lot of mass to lift, even for Starship.

 

You wouldn't need nearly that much power for the atmospheric gas collectors (Lox-Leo). It would not have to be continuous. Energy could be stored and then beamed onward to the spacecraft on an as-needed basis.

 

The Parkins concept posited the use of lead-acid car batteries for powering massive rockets to space from the ground. If that could be achieved, could something that didn't require nearly that much power be used in space instead?

 

 

 

A belated speculation alert for that one.