I worked at Air Products and Chemicals and we provided liquid hydrogen for the nuclear rocket program. But Vietnam was sucking up all of the dollars so the program was scrapped.
Very good and interesting reporting on the NERVA program. I knew Stanton Friedman, who worked on experimental reactors for use in airplanes, of all things, about that same time frame. The advantage of a nuclear reactor on a manned spaceship is that you don't have to carry "raw" H2. You can carry water, which the crew will have with them anyway, and split it as needed using what would be plenty of surplus reactor energy. That should cut down on concerns about a Hindenburg in space.
Another use for water is damping radiation, by using a double wall hull as water tank. NASA must get over their tincans. An interplanetary spaceship must not land. It shall be serviced and refilled at a Space Station.
Halfway to mars, with half the water expended, the crew can enjoy a swimming pool inside the propellant tank. With the engine thrusting, you have a normal pool, when coasting and the ship spinning, you get a toroidal shaped pool with water in a ring around the outside of the tank so you can swim continuously in one direction, circling the tank while swimming in a straight line.
"In the end it turned out it was scientific challenges or any sort of technology barriers ... it was in fact, American Politicians" one of your greatest quotes Angry, well said.
Of course it is, but millions of people believing it to be viable because Musk said so, is worth many billions of dollars and an army of cult followers to do his bidding. You can make a lot of money working on the impossible, as long as you have believers behind you. We know that w can get rockets to Mars, but when we are talking humans to go live there and later return, thing get much more complicated. Travel time and life support just to get there, is a huge problem. Being able to keep them alive on the planet long enough to figure out how to return, is another thing altogether. . Could we do an Apollo style mission? Maybe. It would take a specifically designed spacecraft. The main problem is payload vs thrust. But humans aren't a very efficient payload. Every day we need them to survive, the more payload it takes. Getting robotic rovers safely to the planet is hard enough, but replacing the rover with a human payload, and its life support, becomes a much more complex balancing act. The basic Apollo concept of an orbiting mothership and lander still makes the most sense from an efficiency standpoint. But for all the additional resources and effort, what does it gain us over robotic missions?
Necessary? Why? Nothing there, literally nothing there. Go to a desert, start a colony. No? Same same. Waste going somewhere so close for nothing. Mine the moon for 50-100 years, by then we should have craft that can catch up to Voyager1 or 2 in a week. Then look at other planets, ones we can't see with the naked eye.
Wait a darn minute, Elon, the magnificent said starship will make a trip to in 2025. Mr. Angry must be wrong. I refuse to believe Elon isn't being honest.
@@6DunJuan9 The idea is to become multiplanetary ASAP to preserve the human race. If an asteroid or comet takes Earth out, a self sufficient Martian colony will be our lifeboat.
I realize now why you go by the monicker “The Angry Astronaut.” But, thank you for enlightening me about a very complex topic I was wondering about. This was great.
In reality we've gone backwards since the 70's. Growing up I was hoping space 1999 would of been a reality, but what happened? The space shuttle and stupid space station !
Yes, I was born in 1961 and have to agree with your sentiments! But at least we have Starship now or hopefully we will have it fullfil it's ambitions. Budgetary restrictions 😢
A Space Station is neccessary to do effective human space exploration, but look at Skylab, our 1st orbital station, and look what came after. Extreme backward steps!
After I had to leave nuclear industry. I worked in aerospace. I meet a mentor engineer who was an engineer for the German Rocket program. He said that when these German engineers left the market place, then inavation dropped out of market
Fully correct, Jordan. Our country, from the top down, gave up/gave zero damns. So we wound up with a piss-poor shuttle. I think the first ones to land on Mars should be politicians. They screw things up all the time, so they won't last long.
Solid core nuclear thermal engines make getting to Mars slightly more practical, but regular interplanetary travel back and forth is still going to run into lifetime radiation limits. Regular interplanetary travel, especially to the other planets, likely requires something more exotic like nuclear salt water reactors or laser sails riding ground based lasers, so that the distance could be crossed in days or weeks instead of months.
NASA did not give up on the mission. Hubert Humphrey said during the 72 period that Too much money was being spent on the project. Places like JPL wanted more money spent of planetary exploration projects. The ecompy was facing contraction and rising inflation. And finally the 1973 oil embargo topped the scales.
Wow, very insightful, thank you for sharing, this was the future I was hoping for and unfortunately will not be around long enough now to see it all come true.
In his defense, you really didn't tell the Nazi party "No"..... And he was literally arrested for not being a good enough Nazi. It took 2 higher ranking Nazi party officials to get him out, because they needed him.
How much control would von Braun or the other scientists have over the labor supply at the production factories? That was under the control of the Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production. Once von Braun joined the regime in the late 1930s before the war and slave labor camps began, the die was cast. We treat the Manhattan project scientists as honorable heroes because they produced the bomb and later objected to its use on Japan. But they were perfectly happy to use it on Germany if it had been ready in time even though it was Japan that actually attacked us and which brought us into the war. Lots of Monday morning moral quarterbacking.
0:52 - Actually, quite familiar with how close came as one of my professors in college worked on Kiwi (flightless NERVA). He had some interesting stories from the work like the final destruction test they performed. They pulled all the control rods out and just let the engine go. He noted that it was so powerful on the thrust that it shook itself apart as he saw fuel rods being spit out the nozzle due to the engine breaking some of the struts holding the fuel rods in place and the fuel rods were shot out the nozzle. @Angry - your timing is off on how long it would take to get to and from Mars. Based on information from my professor (the one mentioned above) that was working on the project, it would only take about 30 to 45 days to get to Mars, not 90.
Nuclear Thermal is a good step up from chemical propulsion but is only twice the ISp. We need to do much better. VASIMR, if it can be made to work (And it's very close) would be a real improvement, although it needs a powerful power supply, better than solar, so its own nuclear reactor. Or just bite the bullet and go with NSWR (No, not NSFW lol), though that is a bit crazy but mot needing anything that we don't already have. I may bve back to comment further, later.
Stanton Fried talked a little about this subject being he was a scientist who worked on such projects. I imagine money was a big factor in cancelling the nuclear rocket program. So many projects were going on during the 1960's.
Well, this has been a very interesting video! The last question “What if…” is the one we all ask. Also I’d like to ask if somebody has an answer, Was it worth to spend such huge amount of money on the Vietnam war? What were the benefits of such crazy enterprise? Don’t answer, haha! No politics on this great channel!
in the 70's i collected the PG tips cards about the history of space travel, given away with their tea, there was a nice book you could paste them into too. The point being that they featured the proposed nuclear version of the Saturn V as one of of the final cards in the set, confidently predicting the spacecraft would be built by the 1980's. Oh well.....
I woke up about 20 minutes ago here in Anchorage, Alaska and saw no less than 30 objects moving in different directions. I've never seen anything like it. All these objects were in orbit. 1 even turned directions.one was brighter than venus. Some were moving in groups of 2
The social structure of the country was not ready. The rise of commercial non traditional aerospace companies were not present to drive needed intrastructure
26:1826:18 Can we somehow "mothball" projects like NERVA and their industrial-base, rather than let them vaporise into nothing? Maybe we should bring in an "act" that specifies that such achievements should be preserved in something like the "boneyard" until their time comes back again! I hate going backwards!
Most people don't seem to grasp that they too would have participated in the German WWII war effort if they had be born and raised there when he and his cohorts were. Most of us are not willing to suffer the consequences of acting heroically in such circumstances.
25:00: "Can you imagine is that test [of a nuclear engine in orbit] had taken place in say, 1982?" Any imagining of what NASA could have done needs to take in account the ever increasing schedule delays and cost overruns by NASA, which are approaching exponential growth.
However, a refilled in Orbit Starship Booster and Star ship could give at least some of that ISP and heavy lift capability. Other Starship tankers and getting used refilled at Mars boosters in orbit and an orbital rendezvous with a returning from the surface, Starship and fully loaded fuel booster, would also allow a fast return from Mars.
I don't if it applies to the failure of this engine. But I did see a long time ago, in reply to a suggestion about dumping nuclear waste into the sun. The rebuttal was what a disaster it would if the rocket exploded before attaining obit. 🇺🇦🇯🇴🇬🇪🇰🇷 Vive la Résistance! I am Spartacus!
I was a nuclear engineer in this time period. I interviewed with an engineer that was working on the reactor. The reactor required high ratios of enriched uranium because the reactor had to ramp up very quickly. The development process was very laxed in safety standards
Personally i would rather that the government spend trillions of dollars on scientific research and development, instead of warfare. But there are so many important things that all need a budget.
If you haven't read George Dyson's The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship or John McPhee's The Curve of Binding Energy, then you have no idea what was lost in the late 1960s moon program. We could have had hundreds of scientists and tons of equipment on Pluto by the 1980s. Dyson, Ulaam and Taylor were working on a program that made NERVA look like a toy, their nuclear engine would have had ISP in the millions and favored (required, really) large, heavy spacecraft that could have carried ship-sized crews and cargoes. It was a whole different way to think about space travel, more nautical than aeronautical.🎉
Jordan very true, well done and nice to see the shades back. If Tricky Dicky had not killed the whe sidea of a space tug all of that would be present now. The nuclear space tug is the way forward to the moon and Mars. Imagine starship delivered 100 tons to Leo then forwarded to to moon via tug ?
Yep he also killed the Thorium Molten Salt Reactor that’s why everybody will have to buy there safe efficient Thorium Molten Salt Reactors from china 🇨🇳 in about a decade from now! Think about it 40 year ago we would have solved the climate problem before it even started, No need for carbon credits and no need for fart less cow Chemicals in the cattle feed.
Guy did great things for space exploration, but killed allot of people. How else can you put him on a podium. He is a lucky man in all aspects. But, on the other hand, Space Flight, and that's why his name is not labeled on any ship. He was a sick in the head, smart man.
I love the rocket propulsion in 3 Body Problem. Now that we're learning how to catch and reuse our spacecraft, I hope we can have some sort of advancement in rocket energy generation. I wonder if we could remove the fuel problem. Or maybe we have technology already that doesn't use fuel propulsion, but we can't strap it to a rocket because it could be weaponized by another country. But tell me an energy source that can't cause bodily harm.
Yeah, this "what-could-have-beens" are both fascinating and depressing, but on the up a guide to what is still possible. Nuclear is the way to go, not just to Mars, but I think for Cislunar transport, due not just to speed, but fuel efficiency compared to refueling Starship a zillion times. Ideally, you could use in situ propellant for a nuclear rocket from the Moon or nearby asteroids.
As usual, politicians are the cause of so many of our problems in American and Terran societies. Vietnam was the point that American politicians found they could make war profitable for their own wallets. But just think about the NASA facilities in the Gulf Coast states... Lots of jobs are kept in place by the elected Congressmen in both houses, largely as a job program for those states. BUT..... If NASA had continued with the nuclear engine development, there could be double or triple the available jobs in those states today. They ended up screwing themselves. Hindsight is often 20/20!
More than that, All that we do now was inspired by him, earthwatch, comms, resources mapping, space medicine, space R&D, Space Stations[labs, habitat, pallets] also, telescopes, exploration, RLV's etc. As for example as STS which came directly from research work done in Germany, leading to X-15. Today we have Aurora, BlackStar, X-37B, ff Trekkie ships with iON drive. Now we know re-eng UFO's also helped to get us here. IUS could help us in the place of Nuclear, which is safer with metal Thorium. 70MN ea, was Boeing's.
When discussing Wehrner Von Braun, the first thing that needs to be said is he was a nazi, who brought into nazi ideology, and oversaw slave labor operations that may killed more people then his V2 rocket did. This is more then a black mark or a foot note, it is the major thing he did in his life. His work in and leadership of the U.S. space program is the footnote.
Yeah, or, you send 3 starships, 1 first with the crew and life support for the journey there, the second with the fuel required for the re-accent after the stay on the surface and the third with the supplies and fuel for the return trip. It's easy if you use your logistical brain instead of your rocket science brain.
I was going to Mars in 1987. I had 7 masters in 1967, and I was 13. Then in 1970 I got glasses, and I could not see the stars. Well there goes my trip to Mars and the Navy did not get me as a pilot. One of masters was nuclear, and we studied the very engine that the Angry Astronaut talked about!
Jerry Pournelle claimed that Robert Heinlein remarked to him. Is "Once you get to Earth orbit, you're halfway to anywhere in the Solar System"? He might know, I also have heard from several sources that for his stories. He and Ginny would calculate my hand the actual obits for his books. 🇺🇦🇯🇴🇬🇪🇰🇷 Vive la Résistance! Do not obey in advance!
What killed Nuclear Engines? Physics. Nuclear Engines suck. They're very efficient, but have horrible Delta-V because the tanks would need to be massive to compensate for how massive the engines are. And even then, you're talking about super low thrust. It's a more complex, riskier and less rewarding Ion Thruster
It also needs weapon grade Uranium for ISP levels mentioned here, let's just say it isnt possible in todays geoplotical scenario, we only have low enriched uranium to do this. Then there are engineering challenges in fabricating and maintaining these solid cores in space. The added weight of shielding, and the costs associated with launch,etc alone would make it infeasible.
Now the scientific part has been shown by angry...really welll...I would like to know the $$$$s...how much would cost projects like this...Apollo was VERY!!!, VERY!! expensive...NASA budget was in the 1960s 6 times or more than today's budget....and probably was entirely, or 90% for the moon. I love space but down to earth....i would like to know the costs of these projets....and probably we will know the answer why these projets were shut down
Here, we have Nixon's competitive response to Britain's own home-grown stuff-up, the cancellation of the nearly completed TSR2 ĵet fighter. Who won? Politicians, of course! The actual competition itself could possibly be seen as yet another typical political sleight of hand, the old familiar 'let's call it a draw' trick. And the biggest losers? Everyone and anyone working enthusiastically in the Space Industry! 🙄😢☹️
Literally snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
When you see a show like 'For all Mankind' you'd get really angry
We should be having an Expanse like reality by now if things hadn't gone screwy after Apollo
I see money and I want it for my people instead. @tyvernoverlord5363
I worked at Air Products and Chemicals and we provided liquid hydrogen for the nuclear rocket program. But Vietnam was sucking up all of the dollars so the program was scrapped.
Very good and interesting reporting on the NERVA program. I knew Stanton Friedman, who worked on experimental reactors for use in airplanes, of all things, about that same time frame. The advantage of a nuclear reactor on a manned spaceship is that you don't have to carry "raw" H2. You can carry water, which the crew will have with them anyway, and split it as needed using what would be plenty of surplus reactor energy. That should cut down on concerns about a Hindenburg in space.
Another use for water is damping radiation, by using a double wall hull as water tank. NASA must get over their tincans. An interplanetary spaceship must not land. It shall be serviced and refilled at a Space Station.
Halfway to mars, with half the water expended, the crew can enjoy a swimming pool inside the propellant tank. With the engine thrusting, you have a normal pool, when coasting and the ship spinning, you get a toroidal shaped pool with water in a ring around the outside of the tank so you can swim continuously in one direction, circling the tank while swimming in a straight line.
"In the end it turned out it was scientific challenges or any sort of technology barriers ... it was in fact, American Politicians" one of your greatest quotes Angry, well said.
Nuclear power for Mars has always been necessary. Manned chemical Starship is a dead end.
Of course it is, but millions of people believing it to be viable because Musk said so, is worth many billions of dollars and an army of cult followers to do his bidding. You can make a lot of money working on the impossible, as long as you have believers behind you. We know that w can get rockets to Mars, but when we are talking humans to go live there and later return, thing get much more complicated.
Travel time and life support just to get there, is a huge problem. Being able to keep them alive on the planet long enough to figure out how to return, is another thing altogether. .
Could we do an Apollo style mission? Maybe. It would take a specifically designed spacecraft. The main problem is payload vs thrust. But humans aren't a very efficient payload. Every day we need them to survive, the more payload it takes.
Getting robotic rovers safely to the planet is hard enough, but replacing the rover with a human payload, and its life support, becomes a much more complex balancing act. The basic Apollo concept of an orbiting mothership and lander still makes the most sense from an efficiency standpoint.
But for all the additional resources and effort, what does it gain us over robotic missions?
@@professorg8383Elon’s Spruce Goose. Lockheed and DARPA need to step up now.
Necessary? Why? Nothing there, literally nothing there. Go to a desert, start a colony. No? Same same. Waste going somewhere so close for nothing. Mine the moon for 50-100 years, by then we should have craft that can catch up to Voyager1 or 2 in a week. Then look at other planets, ones we can't see with the naked eye.
Wait a darn minute, Elon, the magnificent said starship will make a trip to in 2025. Mr. Angry must be wrong. I refuse to believe Elon isn't being honest.
@@6DunJuan9 The idea is to become multiplanetary ASAP to preserve the human race.
If an asteroid or comet takes Earth out, a self sufficient Martian colony will be our lifeboat.
I realize now why you go by the monicker “The Angry Astronaut.” But, thank you for enlightening me about a very complex topic I was wondering about. This was great.
In reality we've gone backwards since the 70's. Growing up I was hoping space 1999 would of been a reality, but what happened? The space shuttle and stupid space station !
The ISS was necessary
Yes, I was born in 1961 and have to agree with your sentiments! But at least we have Starship now or hopefully we will have it fullfil it's ambitions. Budgetary restrictions 😢
A Space Station is neccessary to do effective human space exploration, but look at Skylab, our 1st orbital station, and look what came after. Extreme backward steps!
Hence we have the Angry Astronaut. Thats why he is angry.
We haven't gone backwards. They have pushed forward immensely and just kept it for themselves
After I had to leave nuclear industry. I worked in aerospace. I meet a mentor engineer who was an engineer for the German Rocket program. He said that when these German engineers left the market place, then inavation dropped out of market
Very interesting as I was previously unaware of any of this.
Fully correct, Jordan. Our country, from the top down, gave up/gave zero damns. So we wound up with a piss-poor shuttle.
I think the first ones to land on Mars should be politicians. They screw things up all the time, so they won't last long.
Elon could take them in his BFRocket
Excellent research on this video. Great job.
Jordan damned brilliant!!!!! Well done!
Excellent Content
Solid core nuclear thermal engines make getting to Mars slightly more practical, but regular interplanetary travel back and forth is still going to run into lifetime radiation limits. Regular interplanetary travel, especially to the other planets, likely requires something more exotic like nuclear salt water reactors or laser sails riding ground based lasers, so that the distance could be crossed in days or weeks instead of months.
Thanks for this video drop, I really enjoyed this one, such a shame to see all that hard work done in the 60's go to waste.
Maybe not all. They probably still have all blueprints.
NASA did not give up on the mission. Hubert Humphrey said during the 72 period that Too much money was being spent on the project. Places like JPL wanted more money spent of planetary exploration projects. The ecompy was facing contraction and rising inflation. And finally the 1973 oil embargo topped the scales.
Fascinating video, thank you Jordan
Happy new, very interesting document.
An excellent sci-fi roman by British author Stephen Baxter is 'voyage'
Nice job on this vid!
Wow, very insightful, thank you for sharing, this was the future I was hoping for and unfortunately will not be around long enough now to see it all come true.
von Braun, a man who aimed for Mars and only occasionally hit London.
Great presentation!
Happy New Year!! this was an awesome episode!!! Great way for me to begin the first day of 2025!!
“ and you thought my incidental music was annoying” at least I know you’re looking at the comments! Bravo, Jordan
Great reporting!!! Happy New Year!!!
In his defense, you really didn't tell the Nazi party "No".....
And he was literally arrested for not being a good enough Nazi. It took 2 higher ranking Nazi party officials to get him out, because they needed him.
How much control would von Braun or the other scientists have over the labor supply at the production factories? That was under the control of the Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production. Once von Braun joined the regime in the late 1930s before the war and slave labor camps began, the die was cast.
We treat the Manhattan project scientists as honorable heroes because they produced the bomb and later objected to its use on Japan. But they were perfectly happy to use it on Germany if it had been ready in time even though it was Japan that actually attacked us and which brought us into the war.
Lots of Monday morning moral quarterbacking.
Hey...I think you're incidental music is great!
Happy New Year!🎉
Good luck in the New Year, Jordan! Thanks for the coverage.,this year do fewer. Conspiracy vids and more history!
Really outstanding and super interesting video. You do fantastic work! Thank you.
Excellent synopsis of an otherwise forgotten program.
The music at 6 minutes could be Charles Ives or an other great almost forgotten American composer.
0:52 - Actually, quite familiar with how close came as one of my professors in college worked on Kiwi (flightless NERVA). He had some interesting stories from the work like the final destruction test they performed. They pulled all the control rods out and just let the engine go. He noted that it was so powerful on the thrust that it shook itself apart as he saw fuel rods being spit out the nozzle due to the engine breaking some of the struts holding the fuel rods in place and the fuel rods were shot out the nozzle.
@Angry - your timing is off on how long it would take to get to and from Mars. Based on information from my professor (the one mentioned above) that was working on the project, it would only take about 30 to 45 days to get to Mars, not 90.
Wow amazing video, always wanted to know why development of nuclear engages stoped, let hope history don’t repeat itself. Thanks
Nuclear Thermal is a good step up from chemical propulsion but is only twice the ISp. We need to do much better. VASIMR, if it can be made to work (And it's very close) would be a real improvement, although it needs a powerful power supply, better than solar, so its own nuclear reactor. Or just bite the bullet and go with NSWR (No, not NSFW lol), though that is a bit crazy but mot needing anything that we don't already have.
I may bve back to comment further, later.
15:40 What would the EPA or others say about testing on or beyond the Moon?
Stanton Fried talked a little about this subject being he was a scientist who worked on such projects. I imagine money was a big factor in cancelling the nuclear rocket program. So many projects were going on during the 1960's.
😂that music comment instant like
Happy NY AA. Great topic. Nuclear thermal propulsion will be a great advancement. It might cut the time in half, or possibly a third.
Well, this has been a very interesting video! The last question “What if…” is the one we all ask.
Also I’d like to ask if somebody has an answer, Was it worth to spend such huge amount of money on the Vietnam war? What were the benefits of such crazy enterprise? Don’t answer, haha! No politics on this great channel!
Now, do a story in Timberwind
With the ending of ISS what is the future for Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser?
Thé sun glass 😂😂😂 terrible 😅
Annie Jacobson’s book Area 51 goes into the engine tests. In addition it goes into the a12 , sr71 and f117 development
Area 51 is just a red herring area 53 is where things are happening
6:41 I'm fairly certain that that music would actually slap and they just played it wrong.
in the 70's i collected the PG tips cards about the history of space travel, given away with their tea, there was a nice book you could paste them into too. The point being that they featured the proposed nuclear version of the Saturn V as one of of the final cards in the set, confidently predicting the spacecraft would be built by the 1980's. Oh well.....
Galaxy Quest ❤
I like the beard better
I woke up about 20 minutes ago here in Anchorage, Alaska and saw no less than 30 objects moving in different directions. I've never seen anything like it. All these objects were in orbit. 1 even turned directions.one was brighter than venus. Some were moving in groups of 2
The social structure of the country was not ready. The rise of commercial non traditional aerospace companies were not present to drive needed intrastructure
well we now know where the concept came from for Kubrick's vision of Discovery in 2001 A Space Odessey
I'm also curious why haven't the Chinese stolen these designs? Must be highly classified still and not easily hacked into
Thrust (force) = mass X acceleration. So using a lighter propellant isn't an automatic win. How much faster WAS the nozzle acceleration?
26:18 26:18 Can we somehow "mothball" projects like NERVA and their industrial-base, rather than let them vaporise into nothing?
Maybe we should bring in an "act" that specifies that such achievements should be preserved in something like the "boneyard" until their time comes back again!
I hate going backwards!
Wernher was the Elon of his time.
I have not seen a worst analogy in my life. Elon didn’t invent shit and is a conman
A bit much you can't deny his organisation has achieved a lot
Most people don't seem to grasp that they too would have participated in the German WWII war effort if they had be born and raised there when he and his cohorts were. Most of us are not willing to suffer the consequences of acting heroically in such circumstances.
25:00: "Can you imagine is that test [of a nuclear engine in orbit] had taken place in say, 1982?"
Any imagining of what NASA could have done needs to take in account the ever increasing schedule delays and cost overruns by NASA, which are approaching exponential growth.
The DRACO nuclear engine is slated for first testing in 2027. It's still part of the NASA MARS destined program.
However, a refilled in Orbit Starship Booster and Star ship could give at least some of that ISP and heavy lift capability. Other Starship tankers and getting used refilled at Mars boosters in orbit and an orbital rendezvous with a returning from the surface, Starship and fully loaded fuel booster, would also allow a fast return from Mars.
Has anyone ever explained the Xenon 129 in Mars atmosphere?
5:42: That is not 1960's music, but 1930's "modern" orchestral music, in the mode of Rachmaninoff.
I don't if it applies to the failure of this engine. But I did see a long time ago, in reply to a suggestion about dumping nuclear waste into the sun. The rebuttal was what a disaster it would if the rocket exploded before attaining obit.
🇺🇦🇯🇴🇬🇪🇰🇷
Vive la Résistance!
I am Spartacus!
I was a nuclear engineer in this time period. I interviewed with an engineer that was working on the reactor. The reactor required high ratios of enriched uranium because the reactor had to ramp up very quickly. The development process was very laxed in safety standards
This is all dandy, but have you considered that simply sending 10x more starships solves the problem for a fraction of the cost?
Personally i would rather that the government spend trillions of dollars on scientific research and development, instead of warfare. But there are so many important things that all need a budget.
If you haven't read George Dyson's The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship or John McPhee's The Curve of Binding Energy, then you have no idea what was lost in the late 1960s moon program. We could have had hundreds of scientists and tons of equipment on Pluto by the 1980s. Dyson, Ulaam and Taylor were working on a program that made NERVA look like a toy, their nuclear engine would have had ISP in the millions and favored (required, really) large, heavy spacecraft that could have carried ship-sized crews and cargoes. It was a whole different way to think about space travel, more nautical than aeronautical.🎉
Jordan very true, well done and nice to see the shades back. If Tricky Dicky had not killed the whe sidea of a space tug all of that would be present now. The nuclear space tug is the way forward to the moon and Mars. Imagine starship delivered 100 tons to Leo then forwarded to to moon via tug ?
Yep he also killed the Thorium Molten Salt Reactor that’s why everybody will have to buy there safe efficient Thorium Molten Salt Reactors from china 🇨🇳 in about a decade from now!
Think about it 40 year ago we would have solved the climate problem before it even started, No need for carbon credits and no need for fart less cow Chemicals in the cattle feed.
This is why I am angry about space.
What happened was Vietnam, Nixon , Carter ,
Guy did great things for space exploration, but killed allot of people. How else can you put him on a podium. He is a lucky man in all aspects. But, on the other hand, Space Flight, and that's why his name is not labeled on any ship. He was a sick in the head, smart man.
For All Mankind didnt have to do this research on Earth…the EPA probably wont care if we test these engines on the Moon.
I love the rocket propulsion in 3 Body Problem. Now that we're learning how to catch and reuse our spacecraft, I hope we can have some sort of advancement in rocket energy generation. I wonder if we could remove the fuel problem. Or maybe we have technology already that doesn't use fuel propulsion, but we can't strap it to a rocket because it could be weaponized by another country. But tell me an energy source that can't cause bodily harm.
Wars are so much more profitable.
What a shameful loss.
Promises broken...
Yeah, this "what-could-have-beens" are both fascinating and depressing, but on the up a guide to what is still possible. Nuclear is the way to go, not just to Mars, but I think for Cislunar transport, due not just to speed, but fuel efficiency compared to refueling Starship a zillion times. Ideally, you could use in situ propellant for a nuclear rocket from the Moon or nearby asteroids.
I think I emailed you some info/literature ( NERVA) I have on nuclear propulsion systems from the early days of NASA.
As usual, politicians are the cause of so many of our problems in American and Terran societies.
Vietnam was the point that American politicians found they could make war profitable for their own wallets.
But just think about the NASA facilities in the Gulf Coast states... Lots of jobs are kept in place by the elected Congressmen in both houses, largely as a job program for those states. BUT..... If NASA had continued with the nuclear engine development, there could be double or triple the available jobs in those states today.
They ended up screwing themselves. Hindsight is often 20/20!
More than that, All that we do now was inspired by him, earthwatch, comms, resources mapping, space medicine, space R&D, Space Stations[labs, habitat, pallets] also, telescopes, exploration, RLV's etc. As for example as STS which came directly from research work done in Germany, leading to X-15. Today we have Aurora, BlackStar, X-37B, ff Trekkie ships with iON drive. Now we know re-eng UFO's also helped to get us here.
IUS could help us in the place of Nuclear, which is safer with metal Thorium. 70MN ea, was Boeing's.
When discussing Wehrner Von Braun, the first thing that needs to be said is he was a nazi, who brought into nazi ideology, and oversaw slave labor operations that may killed more people then his V2 rocket did. This is more then a black mark or a foot note, it is the major thing he did in his life.
His work in and leadership of the U.S. space program is the footnote.
Nixon! Stopped everything!😢
Those glasses do not make you look angry enough.
I thought Russia had one for some reason.
The ISS was necessary
Yeah, or, you send 3 starships, 1 first with the crew and life support for the journey there, the second with the fuel required for the re-accent after the stay on the surface and the third with the supplies and fuel for the return trip.
It's easy if you use your logistical brain instead of your rocket science brain.
Yup the answer to every failed endeavor is budget cuts.
Follow up question AA... what did you think of For All Mankind?
Happy new years!! 🥳 0:18
That would be the environmentalists and probably the vietnam war.
tldr; What happened is: Politicians.
They probably did ….and can.
I was going to Mars in 1987. I had 7 masters in 1967, and I was 13. Then in 1970 I got glasses, and I could not see the stars. Well there goes my trip to Mars and the Navy did not get me as a pilot. One of masters was nuclear, and we studied the very engine that the Angry Astronaut talked about!
There's lotsa water for reaction mass,,3 of jupiters moons have huge 100km deep oceans, not io,,lol
Ok but the work has been done so why not carry on.
Jerry Pournelle claimed that Robert Heinlein remarked to him. Is "Once you get to Earth orbit, you're halfway to anywhere in the Solar System"? He might know, I also have heard from several sources that for his stories. He and Ginny would calculate my hand the actual obits for his books.
🇺🇦🇯🇴🇬🇪🇰🇷
Vive la Résistance!
Do not obey in advance!
Did you share this information with Elon Musk? if not, you should.
What killed Nuclear Engines? Physics.
Nuclear Engines suck. They're very efficient, but have horrible Delta-V because the tanks would need to be massive to compensate for how massive the engines are. And even then, you're talking about super low thrust.
It's a more complex, riskier and less rewarding Ion Thruster
It also needs weapon grade Uranium for ISP levels mentioned here, let's just say it isnt possible in todays geoplotical scenario, we only have low enriched uranium to do this. Then there are engineering challenges in fabricating and maintaining these solid cores in space. The added weight of shielding, and the costs associated with launch,etc alone would make it infeasible.
Not if you use Orion 😸
@@tristan7216 I doubt Orion will be used after Artemis 5...
Now the scientific part has been shown by angry...really welll...I would like to know the $$$$s...how much would cost projects like this...Apollo was VERY!!!, VERY!! expensive...NASA budget was in the 1960s 6 times or more than today's budget....and probably was entirely, or 90% for the moon. I love space but down to earth....i would like to know the costs of these projets....and probably we will know the answer why these projets were shut down
doubt it work, would blow up
Here, we have Nixon's competitive response to Britain's own home-grown stuff-up, the cancellation of the nearly completed TSR2 ĵet fighter. Who won? Politicians, of course! The actual competition itself could possibly be seen as yet another typical political sleight of hand, the old familiar 'let's call it a draw' trick. And the biggest losers? Everyone and anyone working enthusiastically in the Space Industry! 🙄😢☹️
Even with a Trump administration coming into power, I don’t see the E.P.A. Allowing this to happen! 26:18