O3 sounds like fun to me. If I were younger, I would ride that candle.
Imagine if we could stabilize triatomic hydrogen in liquid form and combine it stabilized O3 in liquid form. That would be wild.
For humans interplanetary travel, I was pondering a high mass flow rate from orbit for the initial speed jump, followed by an ion engine.
The nuke power is a weight challenge. I was working with some folks on a small nuclear power plant for a diesel submarine conversion for the Navy, especially the Seals. But Boeing snatched that and the funding dried up. The key was a thermal electric conversion of 30%. Double the best I could find before them.
Ion engine: Accelerating electrons is easier, but my idea was to accelerate protons for the mass advantage.
Have you read the book "Ignition" by John Clark? It is a broad history of propellant behavior and lore from the Naval Air Rocket Test Station (NARTS) days. He deals with all the strange actors. Ozone was nothing to kid about. The only stable deal I read about was to mix it as a minor solute with oxygen difluoride. The raw stuff was just too touchy. Worse than nitroglycerine. (It will mix with liquid oxygen, stable at a low percentage. But the problem is that oxygen has a lower boiling point and will boil off faster. If the concentration rises above 30%, the mixture will stratify into ozone-poor and ozone-rich [90%] layers, and the high-ozone layer is unstable.)
Your interplanetary thrust / Isp split sounds reasonable. I'm more inclined toward nuclear thermal rocket propulsion. I'm fascinated with nuclear fission rockets, where the nuclear reactions are mingled with the propellant: much higher operational temperatures and specific impulse (about 4000 seconds), but problems with loss of unreacted fissionables. I diagnose the problem as there being too high a loading of fissionables in the thrust chamber, in order to maintain a critical mass. I think the critical neutron flux should be supplied mainly by a solid annular reactor, and only the consumable fissionable mass added to the propellant...but I hadn't gotten a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering. (That's retrospect. Part of not knowing what I needed to do in earlier life.) Sigh. But who knows what terrible mistakes my alternate life could have made? Not nice to second-guess God's plan.
Was Boeing interested in submarines at that point? Or did they just acquire the money? At one point in the 80s, Boeing was working on an oxygen-aluminum electric cell that worked on the oxygen dissolved in seawater, for submerged drone application (miniature unmanned submarine). The Navy never took it up...that I ever heard of. But 30% nuclear powerplant conversion efficiency is pretty good, considering most commercial nuke powerplants are maybe at 40%, and they are fine-tuned.
The trick to my Relativistic Electron Beam Engine Concept (REBEC) was obtaining a high momentum from an initial rest mass. To do the same trick with protons would require them to be accelerated to an energy of about 2 GeV. Difficult to do with massive equipment.
Not that. I hadn't been aware of it, but it seems a clever approach. Robert Zubrin is actually full of clever approaches.
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I got my inspiration from an approach that was briefed to us from Los Alamos, for interceptor propulsion. The interceptor would have a container of uranium-235 hexafluoride gas, and would be inserted into a small nuclear reactor which would pulse it with neutrons, starting a chain reaction in the UF6. The gas would heat up semi-instantly and be expelled out of a nozzle like a bottle rocket. And off it would go.
I like it!! I spent a little time with the Los Alamos folks on a couple of occasions.
Once, I was trying to put together something. At Wright Patterson they had one piece. But they said the other piece: No way, no how, defies the laws of physics. I went down to Los Alamos and they had the other piece sitting on a shelf gathering dust. But they said the other piece: No way, no how, defies the laws of physics. I said: Do you guys ever talk to each other???
Interesting. I like NTP to get things moving, then switching to Ion. NTP is usually liquid hydrogen, but I was thinking about liquid water. I haven’t sorted out the proton acceleration challenge. But, as I always told people who said it was too hard or impossible: You just need to be more creative. Guaranteed discussion win and it is true. This is fun. I haven’t gotten into the weeds in a long time. Add this to your pondering: A train like ship where the propellant “cars” are launched into orbit and attached to the crewed spacecraft with the propulsion system.
I never got around to a PHD. I helped my friend get his. Gave him my organizational leadership methodology that worked for small teams to the largest organization. I usually fixed the problems the PHDs didn’t know they had.
You would be better off with ammonia. If you heated water to dissociation, the average molecular weight would be 12 compared to hydrogen at 2. If a hydrogen engine were to get 1000 sec Isp (round number), the steam engine would get ~408 sec. No better than chemical propulsion. If you heated ammonia to dissociation, the average molecular weight would be 8.5, and the nuclear engine would get ~485 sec, a slight improvement. The number of hydrogen molecules is crucial. One might suppose that methane would be better yet, but the problem is that it might dissociate to methylene (CH2) and hydrogen. I don't know if CH is willing to be a standalone molecule. And you can't run a reactor hot enough to vaporize pure carbon. This all focuses on the huge penalty for a long trip of trying to store liquid hydrogen, for whatever purpose.
When I was in university, I had the three degrees behind me and the only place left was a Ph.D.---which was regarded as an academic path---or to get out into industry. Industry was where I wanted to go, and I did...and met plenty of Ph.D.s! But I got along with them just fine and did good work. One of my inspirations about this was a grad school professor who ran a department research lab. He had never finished his Ph.D. on account of contracting polio. But it didn't stop him from doing the work! He generally had a brilliant idea on a weekly basis.
The hydrogen accelerates easier, but somehow I was looking to increase the M with decreasing the V too much. More thinking required. But hydrogen for now. They seemed to be pretty locked in on Methane. Just had a question from a friend on how best to get methane on Mars. Turns out that a couple of my friends have links to Duffy. I gave him the UofC idea as the best option so far.
Airlock. Been there.
I like the latest in air breathing, solid fuel, throttleable missiles. Something to ponder for space. Solid fuel and liquid oxidizer. Some thought has been done on this. Had an interesting thought, but probably more likely to go big, bada, boom.
O3 sounds like fun to me. If I were younger, I would ride that candle.
Imagine if we could stabilize triatomic hydrogen in liquid form and combine it stabilized O3 in liquid form. That would be wild.
For humans interplanetary travel, I was pondering a high mass flow rate from orbit for the initial speed jump, followed by an ion engine.
The nuke power is a weight challenge. I was working with some folks on a small nuclear power plant for a diesel submarine conversion for the Navy, especially the Seals. But Boeing snatched that and the funding dried up. The key was a thermal electric conversion of 30%. Double the best I could find before them.
Ion engine: Accelerating electrons is easier, but my idea was to accelerate protons for the mass advantage.
Have you read the book "Ignition" by John Clark? It is a broad history of propellant behavior and lore from the Naval Air Rocket Test Station (NARTS) days. He deals with all the strange actors. Ozone was nothing to kid about. The only stable deal I read about was to mix it as a minor solute with oxygen difluoride. The raw stuff was just too touchy. Worse than nitroglycerine. (It will mix with liquid oxygen, stable at a low percentage. But the problem is that oxygen has a lower boiling point and will boil off faster. If the concentration rises above 30%, the mixture will stratify into ozone-poor and ozone-rich [90%] layers, and the high-ozone layer is unstable.)
Your interplanetary thrust / Isp split sounds reasonable. I'm more inclined toward nuclear thermal rocket propulsion. I'm fascinated with nuclear fission rockets, where the nuclear reactions are mingled with the propellant: much higher operational temperatures and specific impulse (about 4000 seconds), but problems with loss of unreacted fissionables. I diagnose the problem as there being too high a loading of fissionables in the thrust chamber, in order to maintain a critical mass. I think the critical neutron flux should be supplied mainly by a solid annular reactor, and only the consumable fissionable mass added to the propellant...but I hadn't gotten a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering. (That's retrospect. Part of not knowing what I needed to do in earlier life.) Sigh. But who knows what terrible mistakes my alternate life could have made? Not nice to second-guess God's plan.
Was Boeing interested in submarines at that point? Or did they just acquire the money? At one point in the 80s, Boeing was working on an oxygen-aluminum electric cell that worked on the oxygen dissolved in seawater, for submerged drone application (miniature unmanned submarine). The Navy never took it up...that I ever heard of. But 30% nuclear powerplant conversion efficiency is pretty good, considering most commercial nuke powerplants are maybe at 40%, and they are fine-tuned.
The trick to my Relativistic Electron Beam Engine Concept (REBEC) was obtaining a high momentum from an initial rest mass. To do the same trick with protons would require them to be accelerated to an energy of about 2 GeV. Difficult to do with massive equipment.
Were you referring to an NSWR propulsion system? Interesting.
Not that. I hadn't been aware of it, but it seems a clever approach. Robert Zubrin is actually full of clever approaches.
| I got my inspiration from an approach that was briefed to us from Los Alamos, for interceptor propulsion. The interceptor would have a container of uranium-235 hexafluoride gas, and would be inserted into a small nuclear reactor which would pulse it with neutrons, starting a chain reaction in the UF6. The gas would heat up semi-instantly and be expelled out of a nozzle like a bottle rocket. And off it would go.
I like it!! I spent a little time with the Los Alamos folks on a couple of occasions.
Once, I was trying to put together something. At Wright Patterson they had one piece. But they said the other piece: No way, no how, defies the laws of physics. I went down to Los Alamos and they had the other piece sitting on a shelf gathering dust. But they said the other piece: No way, no how, defies the laws of physics. I said: Do you guys ever talk to each other???
Interesting. I like NTP to get things moving, then switching to Ion. NTP is usually liquid hydrogen, but I was thinking about liquid water. I haven’t sorted out the proton acceleration challenge. But, as I always told people who said it was too hard or impossible: You just need to be more creative. Guaranteed discussion win and it is true. This is fun. I haven’t gotten into the weeds in a long time. Add this to your pondering: A train like ship where the propellant “cars” are launched into orbit and attached to the crewed spacecraft with the propulsion system.
I never got around to a PHD. I helped my friend get his. Gave him my organizational leadership methodology that worked for small teams to the largest organization. I usually fixed the problems the PHDs didn’t know they had.
You would be better off with ammonia. If you heated water to dissociation, the average molecular weight would be 12 compared to hydrogen at 2. If a hydrogen engine were to get 1000 sec Isp (round number), the steam engine would get ~408 sec. No better than chemical propulsion. If you heated ammonia to dissociation, the average molecular weight would be 8.5, and the nuclear engine would get ~485 sec, a slight improvement. The number of hydrogen molecules is crucial. One might suppose that methane would be better yet, but the problem is that it might dissociate to methylene (CH2) and hydrogen. I don't know if CH is willing to be a standalone molecule. And you can't run a reactor hot enough to vaporize pure carbon. This all focuses on the huge penalty for a long trip of trying to store liquid hydrogen, for whatever purpose.
When I was in university, I had the three degrees behind me and the only place left was a Ph.D.---which was regarded as an academic path---or to get out into industry. Industry was where I wanted to go, and I did...and met plenty of Ph.D.s! But I got along with them just fine and did good work. One of my inspirations about this was a grad school professor who ran a department research lab. He had never finished his Ph.D. on account of contracting polio. But it didn't stop him from doing the work! He generally had a brilliant idea on a weekly basis.
The hydrogen accelerates easier, but somehow I was looking to increase the M with decreasing the V too much. More thinking required. But hydrogen for now. They seemed to be pretty locked in on Methane. Just had a question from a friend on how best to get methane on Mars. Turns out that a couple of my friends have links to Duffy. I gave him the UofC idea as the best option so far.
Airlock. Been there.
I like the latest in air breathing, solid fuel, throttleable missiles. Something to ponder for space. Solid fuel and liquid oxidizer. Some thought has been done on this. Had an interesting thought, but probably more likely to go big, bada, boom.