I think the fundamental difference between a nuclear sub or other ship and a nuclear rocket would be where things can go wrong. If a nuclear boat has a reactor problem, that reactor problem stays on or under the water, pretty much localized.
With a nuclear rocket engine, it’s likely to fail inside the atmosphere and in a way where it fails catastropically that doesn’t even necessarily involve the engine itself being the cause. One faulty heat shielding tile? Congrats, your rocket disintegrated on re-entry and spread fissile material in the upper atmosphere for hundreds or thousands of miles.
That’s why I think nuclear engines specifically for space travel are a bad idea. The only way to make them not a problem is if you assemble them in space and the ships with them are never leaving space, while getting the fissile material from, like, the moon. Which is something we are decades away from even entertaining as a species.
Yeah nobody is really proposing launching them in the atmosphere. I hope lol
And I further agree the thing is a pointless waste. Robots with a few solar panels and RTGs do the job. Sending people into space has been an aerospace scam since the 70s.
Yea, see, I have no faith in them not trying to do exactly that. Any such engine for the next several decades would need to survive at least one flight out of our atmosphere and I do not trust SpaceX with that.
I think the fundamental difference between a nuclear sub or other ship and a nuclear rocket would be where things can go wrong. If a nuclear boat has a reactor problem, that reactor problem stays on or under the water, pretty much localized.
With a nuclear rocket engine, it’s likely to fail inside the atmosphere and in a way where it fails catastropically that doesn’t even necessarily involve the engine itself being the cause. One faulty heat shielding tile? Congrats, your rocket disintegrated on re-entry and spread fissile material in the upper atmosphere for hundreds or thousands of miles.
That’s why I think nuclear engines specifically for space travel are a bad idea. The only way to make them not a problem is if you assemble them in space and the ships with them are never leaving space, while getting the fissile material from, like, the moon. Which is something we are decades away from even entertaining as a species.
Yeah nobody is really proposing launching them in the atmosphere. I hope lol
And I further agree the thing is a pointless waste. Robots with a few solar panels and RTGs do the job. Sending people into space has been an aerospace scam since the 70s.
Yea, see, I have no faith in them not trying to do exactly that. Any such engine for the next several decades would need to survive at least one flight out of our atmosphere and I do not trust SpaceX with that.
I doubt they will go to the expense of building such a rocket. The racket of 15 launches to replace 1 looks like a more lucaritive swindle.
We need to step back from the SciFi and appreciate the mundane.
Yea, they’d only try if that was the only contract they could get.