While the Moon is accessible to us with current technology… the rest of the solar system… including Mars… will require breakthrough technology to colonize in a reasonable time frame. The technology now exists to expand humanity even beyond Mars… to the hundreds of other worlds throughout the solar system.
Join the Terran Space Academy and learn about this amazing research.
Special thanks to Professor Slough and the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts and Fragomatik, the amazingly talented and generous artist who created the animation for the HOPE mission technology and the Fusion Driven Rocket concept.
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Video Credits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6gdTX3TsZI
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You can rely on solar. All that is needed is a low mass/area aluminized mylar mirror which adds only about 1 kg/KW thermal even at Jupiter. This means 2kg/KW if thin film cells used like on IKAROS or about 5 kg/KW at Jupiter. This is much better than any proposed fission based electric power production and it is far from certain whether fusion could do much better.
Hey, great! Hopefully new space will take a look at this concept sooner rather than later.
0:55 The planned first Starship flight test is considered sub-orbital because its 'orbit' intersects with Earth as you say. It still reaches orbital speed (to test re-entry, it must) and what people would consider an orbital altitude. The point being, while technically the flight plan is sub-orbital, it is not particularly easier or less energy intensive than an orbital flight. Apologies, but I gotta represent for the Muskman.
2:45 I heard "Earth" not "Earth's" and went Holy Smokes! 🙂
Isaac Asimov said towards the end of his career that he had been a planet chauvinist. Atmospheres are nice to brake in, ~0g is vastly easier. Earth may have more good stuff than everything but the Sun and Jupiter put together, but most of it seems pretty hard to reach. Three nice 10km asteroids of ice, carbon, radioactives and metals and you have all the resources you need for a long time for lots of people. And there's not just THE asteroid belt, there's plenty of others including *Earth's trojans*. (Which would be a cool idea for an episode)
Earth to the Saturn system might take forever, but a Mars colony is now in sight, then seeding the asteroids, then reaching the Jupiter system. Right time of year, reaching Saturn from the Jupiter system would take, well, still forever but by that time we do it your way 🙂
3:50 LOL I saw what you did there. Only people over 50 get to go on trips to Asgard. And here we have this qualified Terran Academy instructor… 🙂
Awesome vid, thanks!
Fusion would definitely be a dream power source for space travel and in everyday life solving our energy problems.
Thanks for this great presentation!
There is a laser pumped version of this… Also a positron catalyzed fusion system utilizing krypton 79 regenerated via neutron irradiation of krypton78 in a cooling/neutron absorbing jacket… I would love to see development of any of these. The barriers I see are political and the ossification of space launch system into a patronage system.
We need to get off the earth and open up space resources, and perhaps fissile mining of the moon. Starship can do this; I'm a little more skeptical of it to move more than freight to Mars. Perhaps with lunar resources they could actually fill it's fuel tanks and take a higher deltaV trajectory…
I wonder what made them consider gas cooled pebblebed (solid fuel) reactor for that mission.
Surely this was at a time when Oakridge already demonstrated the feasibility of the liquid fuel molten salt reactor, right?
That's a reactor type that was actually considered and initially developed for use in AIRCRAFT (but dropped because shielding is heavy and you can't rely on gravity in an airplane). I mean certainly you can't rely on gravity in space either but that's an engineering problem with solutions. What you get by using molten salts is a much higher power density resulting in much smaller size which should correlate to lower weight of the whole vessel as well as piping and shielding. Further reduction in weight is the fact that your vessel and piping doesn't need to withstand very high pressures of the gas. On Earth the liquid fuel reactor can operate at atmospheric pressure (plus the hydraulic head). In space you could operate well below 1 atmosphere and there's no hydraulic head to consider so your pressure requirements are miniscule.
Very interesting. When you get into nuclear propulsion, there are numerous schemes proposed over the years. It would be interesting to have a breakdown of all of the more feasible nuclear propulsion techs or at least get a sense of how far off we may be to getting one of these techs to work. This particular fusion drive looks a lot like the Z-pinch machine here on Earth, granted the Z machine is a pretty big and bulky piece of hardware with much different design optimizations. I suppose this brings up another point is some of this nuclear drive tech has working examples here on Earth of the basic principles on how it would work. It seems if you want, this could be the first of a whole series of episodes exploring nuclear propulsion in space.
Thank you..
I wonder if it would be possible to manufacture the pellets in-situ, that would help to pack more fuel into the same volume. Also variable thrust.
I wonder why even consider using something not Starship. Then all these tiny landers are irrelevant…. And the amount of people, and all the cargo available… thoughts?
How about a sail ship that floats on solar wind?