[ExI] Thermal nuclear rocketry

[Adrian Tymes]

On Tue, Jul 23, 2024 at 5:55 AM BillK via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> That's great news, Adrian!  People seem to have realised that the
> future needs something better than chemical rockets.
>

Ah, but what part of the future?  Interplanetary missions, and
Earth-to-orbit launch missions, are not the same.  The former won't come
about much until after we have solved the latter much better than we have
now.


> Ars Technica has just published a long article about nuclear thermal
> rockets.
> (with over 200 reader comments).
> <
> https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/07/were-building-thermonuclear-spaceships-again-this-time-for-real/
> >
> Quote:
> We’re building nuclear spaceships again—this time for real
> The military and NASA seem serious about building demonstration hardware.
> Jacek Krywko - 7/22/2024
> ------
>
> and even the UK is interested.
> <
> https://newatlas.com/space/rolls-royce-nuclear-space-micro-reactor-funding/
> >
> Quote:
> Rolls-Royce gets $6M to develop its ambitious nuclear space reactor
> By David Szondy   July 23, 2024
> -------------
>

As the former article points out, there is not yet much demand for taking
things to Mars.  There is a little, but not much, demand for deliveries to
the Moon today.  This is a problem for any expensive solution that is only
usable for said purposes.  DRACO and the Rolls Royce effort stand a good
chance of being eventually cancelled for budget without delivering any
actual hardware - or at least, delivering anything beyond LEO, if they even
get that far - for precisely this reason.

Lower cost, more reliable, and much faster service to LEO, though?  There
is massive unserved and underserved demand for that today.  NTRs developed
to serve today's needs, can be adapted to further missions once the demand
is there.

Elon Musk did not start SpaceX by developing rockets that could only go
from Earth orbit to Mars.  That's not CubeCab's plan either.
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