NASA's Promethius project....

[Dr Mordrid]

AKA: nuclear electric propulsion;

http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20040730-052921-9674r

Dr. Mordrid

[K6-III]

Project Promethius is what NASA should truly be working on. (Developing technology for the space frontier)

Established rocket technology can be left to private industry...

[rylan]

Yeah Ionic propulsion technology is pretty cool. NASA's Deep Space 1 probe uses that, except it only has solar power to use for creating the magnetic acceleration field.
With a nuclear generator they could actually get some thrust. Can anyone say Impulse Engine from StarTrek?

[Technoid]

about time they started using nuclear power

[Dr Mordrid]

Experience with small, self contained reactors been available for some time based on whats been done in submarines. Scale down something along those lines using MPBR tech (they can't melt down) and you have something just about perfect for space flight.

Now what they really need is a new heavy lift booster....maybe even a retooling of the Saturn V using todays tech. Still think it was a mistake not to continue that line.

Dr. Mordrid

[rylan]

Agree, our heavy lich booster tech has pretty much stopped advancing.

Personally I think the future of space exploration is in proplution technology, so its really nice to see them going ahead with this. I hope they keep up with the technology to get off the planet however... those cool warp drive engines aren't going to be very usful if they just sit on the ground.

[Joel]

Established rocket technology can be left to private industry...

Actually it should all be left to private industry. The government should get out of it altogether. SpaceShipOne proved that space flight is possible and cheaper without government interference.

Joel

[Dr Mordrid]

There's other new tech coming along for deep space missions that also sounds like it's right out of Star Trek.

It's called M2P2 (mini-magnetospheric plasma propulsion). It's an electromagnetic bubble (or plasma sail) generated using existing technologies that does two things;

1. shields against alpha, beta, cosmic particles, solar wind/CME's etc. in much the same way the Earths magnetosphere does.

2. acts as a solar sail in that the solar wind pushes against it, allowing acceleration of even modest versions to very high speeds.

http://www.ess.washington.edu/Space/M2P2/theory.html

The magnetic field will be supported by solenoid coils on the spacecraft. By injection of plasma, the size of the bubble can be greatly increased from a small size to a large size, for which the interaction with the solar wind is greatly increased.

The solar wind travels at 300 - 800 km/s (Seattle to Washington, DC in ten seconds or fewer). Like the balloonists traveling the winds of the Earth, the mini-magnetosphere (which is attached to the spacecraft) will be picked up by the solar wind and attain similar speeds.

300-800 km/s ??

Dr. Mordrid

[Jon P. Inghram]

http://www.sec.noaa.gov/ace/MAG_SWEPAM_2h.html

The yellow one is the solar wind speed.

[ZokesPro]

Originally posted by Technoid
about time they started using nuclear power

About time they stop using it for destruction of human's.

Although traveling in a space ship going who knows how fast is kinda like sitting in a bullet waiting to crash into something.

[K6-III]

Originally posted by Joel
Actually it should all be left to private industry. The government should get out of it altogether. SpaceShipOne proved that space flight is possible and cheaper without government interference.

Joel

I do not think the environment is yet in place for private industry to operate on its own entirely, especially in areas beyond earth orbit.

In these cases, it can be much better for the government to sponsor the initial R&D that shall allow future efforts to occur.

As for SpaceShipOne, it has shown that suborbital spaceflight can be done entirely by private industry.

Given a similar prize for orbital flight, I would not doubt the same with a booster from SpaceX and a capsule designed for the task. NASA's Millenial prizes are supposed to do just that, although political wrangling could very well kill them.

As for a heavy lift booster, I don't see a market for it yet. Lunar missions are possible with existing boosters. Smaller capacity leads to higher flight rate, bringing down unit cost by producing rockets on an assembly line, in bulk. This, in turn, attracts more launch vehicle providers to the market. When the market exists for high flight rate with a heavy cargo, only then can a heavy-lift vehicle be pursued.