Re: Project Orion Reborn(cont'd)


Posted by Pasti on Feb 12, 2004 at 00:02
(67.69.240.236)

Re: Project Orion Reborn. (Pasti)

Sorry, I pushed the wrong button before time.

"It can carry the industrial infrastructure necessary to maintain a permanent foothold in space. Everything necessary to mine, refine and utilise space resources."

Huh? According to you such thing can never land, so you have to carry everything to it, from fuel to materials. So you need an extraordinary expensive and complex infrastructure to support this project.Which for the time being "ain't none", so to speak.Or maybe you would like the two remaining old shuttles (or three, whatever) to spoonfeed the load in the cargo bay?It would take at least 5 years (you can do ~20 trips a year if you use at maximum the existing shuttles which have pitifully small cargo bays compared to the scale of the ship you propose) to load a ship like you propose!Good thinking!

"I haven't forgotten anything. Uranium isn't restricted to the earth."

You missed mu point.Before you start to mine someplace else,the ship will have to be refueled by Earth, and since it cannot land, the fuel has to be shuttled to it.Which adds to the above loading time.

And suppose you find a "good" planet, say Mars, where you can refuel it from mining.How do you do it?If you want to land it how will you land it?it was only designed for takeoff.If it doesn't land on Mars either, then you need to have shuttles aboard for various tasks, and landable containers.
Wow!This thing should be of the size of a star destroyer from Star Wars!

"Please point out which arguments have gone unanswered."

Protection of the crew and cargo load against radiation?Have you checked the cross-sections for steel under X and gamma radiation? You claim 60 cm of steel would suffice.If you take a look in those tables, and do an estimate calculation for the elmg yield of a fusion bomb, you will see that your steel and frame protection is bogus.
Do rough calculations,semiclassically,no need to go relativistic, based on the elementary nuclear reactions in a H bomb (you can find them in any book of nuclear physics under H fusion), and calculate the energies of the output quanta.Go to the interaction cross-section tables and find the cross-sections for the relevant energies.Calculate the absorption coefficient for any steel you like.Use the Beer-Lambert formula for absorption in the steel you chose and calculate the half-path for the X and gamma rays. Let me know what that thikness is. Then redo the calculations for 80%, which would be a minimum for the safety of the crew.Then, redo the calculations for Pb (lead).Let me know what you got,if you still think your ideea is reasonable, after you calculate the amount of steel, lead or whatever necessary for the pusher plate. Just for the pusher plate.

"We didn't conquer anything. How many was it? Six short visits to our satellite. That isn't conquering space. Apollo wasted a million dollars a day. It was the worst thing that ever happened to space exploration. Was probably a major influential cause of the following recession. Every spare dollar was redirected from other programs including Orion. It murdered the space age."

And what makes you think that your ideea will cost less?Even if you make the parts in China, your project will cause a depression, not a recession.

"That has been the mantra for the last 30 odd years. NASA's would love to hear you say that."

Too bad,since I am not exactly pleased with the NASA way of doing things.Especially in the last 20 years.

"Their philosophy is to just keep throwing money at their stupid programs until the damn things work."

It is more a modern social trend than NASA's philosophy, you know?

"For the cost of the ISS we could have colonised the entire solar system several times over."

You must be joking.Compared to the scale of your project, ISS is just spare change.Do a little bit of math to convince yourself.


"We don't have any other technology and guess what. There isn't going to be any."

It will be.In fact there is (and I don't mean the Orion project)with the current technology, but as I said before, what lacks is financial commitement.



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