Talk-Polywell.org

There's an article in the on-line Washington Post titled: Miniature nuclear reactors might be a safe, efficient source of power by Brian Palmer, Tuesday, Sept. 14, 2010. It's all about fission reactors making a comeback. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/13/AR2010091304026...

But to me, any potentially impacting asteroid is also a potential candidate for mining. You already have an Earth fly-by. You need a delta-V to effect a rendezvous, and then enough energy to take it apart so that the pieces can be refined... somewhere... I second that! Wonder if an terrestrial mini...

Damage goes as the cube root of energy. So it is not as bad as it seems. Even if it goes as the square root of energy (detonation at optimum height) it takes 100X as much energy to get 10X the damage. Thanks for the insight. I presume the cube root is related to volume (rather than my naive linear)...

A while back, I tried to do some comparisons to grasp the magnitude of an Apophis impact. It turned out to be a really hard thing to grasp just because of the magnitude. Here are estimates I see from Wikipedia and other sources, given in terms of megatons of TNT (MT). * 0.012-0.022 MT -- atomic bomb...

Some alert reader decided to transcribe the portion of the comfirmation hearing where Bolden made this comment. It turns out his friend is former astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz, and the system is definitely VASIMR. http://www.spacepolitics.com/2009/07/09/passing-the-audition/ I believe flight test of...

Paragraph below is taken from the article "Chalie Bolden's vision for NASA" http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2009/07/charlie_boldens_vision_for_nas.html Third, Bolden said that NASA had to make space exploration more entrepreneurial. He cited the example of a friend who was using venture ...

It appears that the British Interplanetary Society (BIS) and the Tau Zero Foundation foundation has kicked off a follow-on study to Project Daedelus, which examined a fly-by of Barnard's Star back in the 1970s. BIS page: http://www.bis-spaceflight.com/sitesia.aspx/page/1964/l/ Tau Zero page: http://...

I would not seed language in the ACES act, which seems to be aimed at alternative energy deployment. Before you get the people at large to want it, you need to get the science and engineering community educated and backing it; I don't think we're there yet. If there were a bill about energy research...

I think Rick means one of these: http://nextbigfuture.com/2007/11/fusion-propulsion-if-bussard-iec-fusion.html I almost forgot about Tom's ISDC presentation. I'm sure he interprets the data better than I do. I think the first slide on that page sums up the booster scenario: * specific impulse: 1538...

Aaaand it looks like someone has already patented my idea for an MHD turbine on the back end of a scramjet. Darn... You mean this thing? " Magnetogasdynamic Power Extraction and Flow Conditioning for a Gas Turbine " http://gltrs.grc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/GLTRS/browse.pl?2003/TM-2003-212612.html It's lat...

By the way, to me, 11,800,000 m/s is a really awesome exhaust velocity. (1/25 * light speed )

* I recall something in one of the QED papers about specific impulse of 1500 seconds on the low end. (My notes say: "Inertial-Electrostatic-Fusion Propulsion Spectrum: Air-Breathing to Interstellar Flight", Bussard and Jameson, AIAA Journal of Propulsion and Power, March-April 1995 vol.11 no.2 (pp....

You could use something heavier (methane? water?) with a lower exhaust velocity and get the same momentum. But then you need more of it, mass-wise. This is the whole reason they use LOX/LH2 in the first place. You could use something heavy at the same exhaust velocity, and not have to deal with hug...

But doesn't the space shuttle main engines have a thrust to weight ratio (shuttle and full tank included) less than 1? I know is this from a while back, but I didn't see any clarification... so here goes... Scanning some Wikipedia pages, the Space Shuttle thrust/weight ratio is 6.78 million lbf / 4...

Something that worked well for the Mars rovers: instead of building a single rover as original ly proposed, two were built at the same time. This allowed the construction of the rovers to be used to validate each other, and quite likely improved the changes of mission success. Now, admittedly the ro...