New Mars Forums

This thread is not and has never been a "clearinghouse for info on the CEV". People really need to observe proper netiquette about holding to a topic, or starting a new thread.

> The problem is will it be cheap enough? For NASA to DO anything useful, then it needs to basically cut the price in half. I do not trust NASA to do this, since that would involve getting rid of signifigant numbers of engineers, which NASA has resisted doing tooth-and-nail for decades. The entire Shuttle infrastructure, much of it antique and left over from Apollo... too big and un-automated I think... is a stone round' our necks, not an asset.

Actually, the ISS is the deadweight. The ISS can't be assembled by crews put up on CEVs (Soyuz for the time being) to assemble cargo put up by cheaper non-reusable boosters because each load needs to be integrated at once by the Shuttle itself. This dooms us to http://nasaproblems.com/#Pods]flying crews unprotected in the Shuttles as we have been.
20+ missions of EVA to assemble it, and we trust that we won't have another serious problem or program holding/extending problem that requires us to break word and keep the Shuttles flying past the deadline set by the CAIB report. (does anybody believe this?)

The army of people for Shuttle should be used to develop the CEV. If they can't be tasked with that, let them go and hire new people who can use the funding from the cut Shuttle program to build a CEV. Put others of the Shuttle army to work building and launching Shuttle-C for the big loads we need to do Lunar and Martian missions. For the money they've been using to launch 4-5 Shuttles a year, they could double the rate of Shuttle-C, keeping as many people on the jobs doing more useful work.

Question for anybody who can: How much of the ISS that still needs to be put up could be done with crews up there on a Shuttle or in the station itself (after it's gotten enough to let them do something other than housekeeping) assembling loads put up on unmanned, non-reusable Shuttle-Cs? Could we "finish the ISS" any faster or with less Shuttle flights?

(I speak specifically about only the Shuttle-C, because anything else like the Ares requires new ETs, and the Z variant requires ne ETs. The Shuttle-C uses everything we're using now, including vehicle stacking and handling, the rotating service arm, and the flame trenches. Nothing new about it but the dumb expendable cargo pod with expendable engines on the back.)

I think it was in "Mining the Sky", Lewis reported that the last 3 Saturns were halted partway through construction. They were turned into museum pieces, the tools and dies were sold off as scrap, and one set of diagrams was sent to the national archives. He said he looked for it, but it couldn't be found. I've since heard that it's turned up, but I haven't seen anything concrete.

I'm partway through building the Estes model rocket of the Saturn-V. I've had to put it away in storage, but it's gorgeous -even more so since it's flyable! It uses their biggest engine,, and goes up 100 feet!
I want one of the old plastic model kits of it too.

Here's something interesting:

Case Gets Stronger that 'New Moon' Apollo Part
11 October 2002
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/s … 21011.html

Space Elevator digression

Let's take this elsewhere: there's a previous thread over at
http://www.newmars.com/forums/viewtopic … 7]>Science and Technology
>>Space Elevators, Ho!

The problem with the ESA/CNES Hermes is that it grew into a "Mini-Shuttle", a camel (beast designed by a comittee). They wanted it to do all the missions a Shuttle could, and stay on-orbit for 90 days or whatever.
A "shuttle" doesn't do that. A PLS crew launch/landing assuredly safe vehicle doesn't do all that.
It puts all its capabilities into carrying people with as close to asured safe recovery as possible. Instead of payload bay, robotic arms, EVA-prep areas, and comsumeables for 4 people for 3 months, it has landing gear and airbags/chutes. It has survival gear for arctic/land/desert/ocean abort and landing sites. It's not stripped down to bare bones so it can have any useful payload on top of all the various equipment all these other requirements has. The total weight you can put on top of a booster is dedicated to keeping people alive and healthy no matter what happens from sitting fueled at zero altitude-zero speed on the pad to hypersonic abort halfway to orbit.
It's definitely easier to do this without a payload bay and communications satellite and everything.
That weight creep is what killed Hermes. No version of the Arianne launcher could carry it, so funds had to be diverted to a new booster development program, and together, they ran out of funding. A good example of two designs chasing each other's numbers around in circles, getting ever bigger.
They went ahead with the newer versions of the Arianne V booster, but the wished for wet-dream of a super do-everything Shuttle died of obesity before it was born.

Except for small stuff that can take the place of people inside, it doesn't work to put a lot of payload capacity into a crew vehicle. Reusability adds a lot of complexity, making it manned adds more, and making it big enough for cargo drives both of them up. You don't need to give a satellite as much protection as crew, and you don't want to spend as much on cargo. You can insure a satellite, but you don't want to treat a crew the same.
I don't believe that any kind of technology development is going to change that, unless we get super-efficient and clean and reliable fusion powered rockets and everything is so well known and used that we have no doubts about a "Shuttle II" or "III" that again is designed to be a combination hotel/research vessel/industrial park/free-market cargo hauler/hypersonic exo-atmospheric interceptor & satellite inspector & Fractional Orbit bomber all at once.

Separate vehicles for different requirements. Why carry ocean abort survival gear beyond LEO? The point about free-return aborts is good, but I don't think it makes sense to design every CEV as if we expect it to come in at better than escape speed. Is our ISS crew carrier going to be designed so that it can be easily and cheaply be built instead as an interplanetary speed re-entry vehicle? Are the requirements so similar that one vehicle frame design can do it all? Isn't it chaper to build different capsules instead of an F-35 Joint Strike Fighter?
What, modular construction so that extra comsumeables can be added for interplanetary flight? A lifeboat doesn't need to be continuously habitable for days and days, in space, drawing power and cycling air refrigerating fuels. Better not.

The Shuttle is the first and only crewed launch vehicle that didn't have crew escape. I recall reading testimony from Michael Coates saying that he remembers sitting strapped into a Shuttle (in '84, I think) while a hydrogen fire burned below them. They all knew that if it went out of control, hey'd never be able to get away in time, so there they sat. With every other launcher, they can jet up and away in seconds (because it's not a 100 ton behomoth that needs a perfectly controlled runway landing or it's destroyed).

The HL-20 was designed so that normally, it could land at any commercial airport, plus parachutes and floatation bags for a water splashdown from a pad abort. I'd personally like to see even more payload given to a supply of fuel and a jet engine like the MiG-105 or Pioneer Rocketplane for cruise, go around, and self-ferry. If the landing gear don't work, get down near landing/stalling speed, pull the handle and plop it down on the airbags.
Again, you've got to be really careful of trying to design it to do too many things, but even if it only carries 4 people, extra capacity to get them down safely fits the beast's only design criteria.

A few things about some points discussed here.

First, for going to the Moon as practice for Mars; as Zubrin pointed out in "the Case for Mars", it's nonsensical. Simply saying that they both have lower gravity doesn't say enough. Mars is more like the Earth than the Moon in that, so we're a lot better off practicing here. Similarly, using the Moon as a "stepping stone" for Mars doesn't make sense either. You'd have to launch more from Earth to get to the Moon than to get to Mars directly. Even if there were pure fuel sitting on the Moon, you'd need more to get there and then boost out to Mars. He shows that the Moon is more of a dead weight on the way to Mars than a stepping stone.

Next, about defacing things by mining;
During the NASA Ames 1970s Summer Studies on Space Settlements and industries, they worked out real hard numbers for mining the Moon and building a space factory and a colony for 10,000 workers. At the end of 20 years, the colony is finished and ready to turn its efforts to constructing things. At that time, the mining "scar" on the Moon is about 3 meters deep, about the size of a football field -not even visible to the best telescopes. During the whole effort, a mining engineer figured that it would barely keep one tele-operated bulldozer occupied.
Another way of looking at space mining is illuminated by a numbers exercise done by Jerry Pournelle to answer the awful question "Why do all that in space when there's so much needed down here?" He said "If we want to help out the poor peoples and developing nations, how about we start by providing them access to raw materials resources to match the richest nations in the West?"
He took figures for the annual metals production in the US, divided per-capita, multiplied by the world's population, and rolled it into a ball of cheap 3% ores (very cheap compared to the asteroids, some of which are over 80% Ni-Fe).
It came out to a ball about 7km diameter.

I have to point out that the Asteroids are by far the best targets for mining. Mars is at the bottom of a deep gravity hole. Anything produced there is used there, as in ISRU “Living off the Land”.
In addition to the difficulty of getting energy for processes on the Moon, and the poor metals content there, is the lack of volatiles. For every ton of finished metals from Lunar ores, you need from 7 to 10 times the finished mass in water and process chemicals. Far better than bringing it from Earth is to get it from NEAs. So to mine the Moon, you go to the asteroids first, but once you do, you have a source of far better resources. The Moon is not much use for anything but science for its own sake, and tourism (In a chamber on the Moon which is pressurized to Earth sea-level, you could literally fly with pair of wings strapped to your arms!) For astronomy, you want to go to deep space. Long baseline interferometry in space means far more for observations than any benefits from putting a telescope on the Moon.

The immediate benefits from mining resources in space is just for doing things in space. For any payload we put into LEO which is going to GEO or interplanetary space, fully 45% of what we’ve put up is the oxidizer in the upper stage for kicking it beyond LEO. If you can get fuels in space, then we can put up that much more payload. Simple solar ovens can bake volatiles out. We just need the infrastructure to refuel things in space.
Next is simple structures for building things. Over 75% of a satellite’s mass is simple rolled and stamped metals which could be relatively easily produced in readily designed space manufacturing facilities.  That means even less needs to be lifted from Earth. Next is the revolution that’s possible from building and integrating satellites. Present telecommunications satellites are severely limited by the amount of power available from solar panels, and the size of antennae which must all be remotely unfurled after the thing separates from the upper stage (a common failure point, BTW). Wire and foil for antennae are also fairly easily built, and with a huge antenna and ample power, and antenna array in GEO could pick up a cel phone from the ground. That’s a relatively early and huge source of profit, to drive and support the space industry.

A good article about building up space infrastructures is this article by Bruce Mackenzie, formerly exec director of the Mars Society.
Bootstrapping Space Communities

http://www.ari.net/moon/forum/mp/mp-4/b … strap.html
He makes good points about starting small, and don’t think of sending people to the Moon from the start or maybe not for a long while, because that drives the cost and complexity up very steeply. Tele-operated rovers can do a lot of the work to start using the resources to gradually build up the effort from what little you can get with a small operation. Sure, you’ll have some losses from breakdowns which you can’t fix using rovers, but they’re small and cheap. Salvage or repair what you can, and stockpile the rest as spare parts which might not be fully recovered until you can send people on visits to do what the rovers can’t. I’d suggest the same sort of thing on an NEA, except that the time-lag makes it work better on the Moon. Just go to a water-rich NEA first, to attach motors to bring it back to high Earth orbit while your factory is being built up.

http://www.permanent.com definitely has a lot of good information about all of this, and see also http://www.neofuel.com for mining asteroids for volatiles.

Mars is a good starting point, because as Zubrin and Mars Direct shows, you can do it without too much up-front effort. The starting “profit” is science, particularly life. All this about the Moon and asteroids means a lot, but Mars is a big sexy politically popular target.
In fact Mars’ moons are good first mission targets too (Fear and Dread were the 2 warhorses which pulled Mars’ war chariot). They have a lot of water and volatiles, and they’d serve very well as immediate start-up fuels mining bases and Martian exploration bases. Borrowing from Brian O’Leary’s book “Mars 1999”, the first manned missions might not even plan on landing on Mars. Just tele-robotically explore it while building up the water mine.

The Deimos Water Company
http://www.spacefuture.com/archive/the_ … pany.shtml

This has been gone over a few times on another thread here

Interplanetary transportation
» Nuclear Propulsion - The best way for space

And I'm sorry, but Orion still has a lot of promise.

How many technical breakthroughs are required for GCNR or VASIMR?
and the main objection to Orion's feasibility is the cost of the pulse bombs and the difficulty of landing it?
please.

And Orion is not only best for lifting from the ground.
3 weeks transfers to Mars, with 45%+ of the IMLEO being payload.
I haven't seen any qualified technical publications countering General Atomics' finding that the cost of the Saturn-V booster was the greatest part of the cost of their 10 meter, ~500 ton, 8 person ship design.
More recent NASA looks at it (dubbing it EPPP) improve the isp by nearly triple the original ~1800. and still the hardest technical challenge is some way to toss kegs aft at ~10 meters/sec and recoating the pusher plate with grease mist.

I haven't heard any way that GCNR or NSWR beat that.

At least, I insist that it not be laughed out of consideration! At this early stage, by amateurs on a 'net discussion board!

Personally, I don't think very much of the 16,000 ton+ ground launch monsters (until somebody can show me that it could be clean enough, and then it's instant interplanetary civilization time!). Not that I think little or poorly of it, but I don't include it in my thoughts very much, because of the space-assembled HLV-boosted option.
Even if you don't like to allow the consideration of the old 10 meter design, which starting pulsing it at ~80 km, it still has a lot of promise.
Six or so HLV shots to LEO with modular sections corresponding to the old 10 meter ship, and we've got a hell of an interplanetary capability. Any large scale interplanetary mission architecture I've seen starts with a similar IMLEO, and nothing I've seen that's as near term offers similar performance.

Long term even, if technical improvements come about allowing the feasibility of things that are more exotic than "Old Bang-Bang", Orion still stays in consideration because any of these breakthroughs would only make some form of nuclear pulse even that much more attractive -even a fission bomb initiated design of some sort.
100,000 ton interplanetary liners with thousands of people setting out for a 3 month voyage to the colonies around the Jovian moons with stopovers at Mars before getting back to Earth orbit -without refueling en-route?
Not at all far-out or even unsuitable to me.

And shorter term, I refuse to plan around appeasing people like the hysterical nuclear-phobic nuts who claimed that a booster malfunction during the launch of Cassini would have given 10,000 cases of cancer to everyone alive. I read one such nutcase (in this guy's case, I don't hesitate to use this kind of flanguage) who said that there's no moral difference between enjoying never-before-seen images of another planet from a space probe using nuclear power, and getting your rocks off watching a PGM hit an Iraqi bunker.
I will not tolerate planning our future in space as if they have a reasonable voice in policy and public education about space and the hope and promise of space. If they want to chain themselves to the launch pad to protest a probe that has RTGs or thermal warmers, let 'em have at it.

Cyclers have been looked at for a long time. The problem is that Orbits of the planets don't line up conveniently. Unless the station/cycler has a lot of Delta-V to burn every orbit, it won't meet a planet every time is comes to the planet's orbit around the Sun.
Any rocket uses lots of propellant to push the station (expecially if it's shielded), and ion drive just doesn't have the thrust to do the job.

One way around this which has been suggested is the Magnetic Sail. It uses solar power for energy, and requires no propellant to be used for maneuvers.

Another comment about this is that the cycler follows Hohman transfer orbits, taking many months on each leg of a trip. Granted, the crews get shuttled to the cycler on cheap taxis, and they spend the trip in full gravity (spin the habs) and full shielding (~hundreds of tons per passenger if using mass shielding, or magnetic sails protect against solar radiation but not cosmic rays).
They're still sitting in a can, waiting for months between destinations.

If we have a fuel production infrastructure in place, to make nuclear pulse rocket thrust-bombs, then it's a few weeks to Mars, 3 months to Jupiter in huge luxury liners.
Either old fashioned fission bomb Orion, or maybe Daedalus or ICAN or the newer "Mini-Orion" if possible.

soph Mar. 09 2003
> A fusion engine, in the 20-40 year future, may allow 1 week to a month trips to Mars.

The problem there, is that fusion has been 20-40 years in the future, just about for the last 40 years. We don't even know for certain if a sustained fusion reaction is possible short of a star.
Orion uses atom bombs. The hardest parts of a space-use Orion ship are a giant grease mist sprayer, to coat the pusher plate between pulses!

Compare that also to VASIMR... NTR may be more readily buildable, because every part of it has seen use in a rocket motor to date.
NTR and VASIMR both suffer compared to Orion in performance. Nothing else as close to coming off the drawing boards is as realistically feasible as Orion -and has anything like the incredible performance.

> Orion, I just don't see the need for.

No need for big strongly built ships, built with updated 1960s technology, that outperform anything else as easily built, as well as just about everything else that's only now theoretically possible as a lab curiosty?
What do you look for in a ship?

> It's inefficient

It's simple. The fuel production is a bit of a problem in the far future, when we've already used up the extra decomissioned warheads. I'm prepared to say we'll deal with that when we get there.
Also, projections show that the bigger space-only ships have potential for isp of between 10,000-1,000,000 seconds. That's in the range of ion propulsion, vastly better than NTR, better thrust and much simpler than VASIMR.

> perhaps useful for speed bursts in space

Uh, yeah, speed bursts with huge robust ships, with over 45% of the initial mass being cargo. Like a battleship able to cross the Atlantic at 35+ knots, carrying thousands of tons of cago, with the crew in big roomy luxury-class quarters, with ltl or no fuel being burned from its bunkers. Sorry, but passenger liners are out of business...

> but you need a huge pusher plate for it

Maybe not what you mean, but I actually like this detraction of Orion I've heard: "It needs a big huge pusher plate made of steel, and it needs lots of heavy structure to hold together. Lots of waste mass in all that"
Correction: The pusher plate & heavy structures aren't mass penalties, but enablers. They let us use the raw simple power of the atomic bomb, and at that, they have plenty of power left over for a vast proportion of the ships mass to be useful payload sent on quick trajectories.
I like the (ability to use/requirement for) strong battleship structure. Throw in lots of other "waste mass" in the form of redundant sysems, alternate pathways & conduits, tools, spare parts, machine & repair shops.

> which means that you really can't make it a hybrid.  It is a rather restrictive design.

Wht else do you want? Extra power production? Toss in a couple or RTGs and some solar panels folded up in the 30 tool lockers spaced throughout the ship. Add batteries in (each primary and the 3 redundant separately placed) power junction boxes, with computers dedicated to power handling built in. The ships' 4 primary redundant fission plants can be provided with parts commonality and lots of extra space to work around them via telerobotics.
What- it's too much mass? We only have 6000 tons of payload left of our 10,000 ton ship built up in HEO from NEA materials... What to do? Add more tools!
All this is survivability, which is the primary payload.

Saw something on this tread about the radiation hazard to the crew.
They placed the crew at the top of the stack, with all the mass f the ship in between them and the blasts. Fallout isn't a problem when you're going away from the blast site at high speed.
NASA took a newer look at nuclear pulse recently. They seem to have avoided bad PR by calling it "Externally Pulsed Plasma Propulsion with no mentio of nuclear pwer. Their ship was called Gabriel, and the simplest cheapest version was a 10 meter module boosted into space via chemical HLVs (just as the 10 meter Orion). It was the least efficient, but it outperformed everything else we could build.

Interestingly, they said that the fast transit times available meant that the exposure to space radiation was so brief that EPPP meant less radiation exosure for the crew.

I've never heard an answer on the environmental impacts of widrespread solar: production of the cels involves metals leaching and etching, with lots of nasty runoffs. Do all solar cel makers take care of their wastes as well as the "green" packaging implies? What about disposal/recycling of dead cels?

I too favor solar cels on every rooftop and cartop, but covering the entire unused surface area of trhe continent isn't trivial, and how does solar & wind provide for the energy needs of a modern mobile industrial society?

Build nuclear plants to use up the economically mined U and Th ores, then build breeders to deal with most of the waste issues (getting more energy from reprocessed spent fuel than was produced spending that fuel).
Take the Pu end product from the breeders, and make thousands of identical atom bombs to be launched into space in special containment and loaded into Orion space ships (thus blowing our radioactive waste problem off into the solar wind).
These ships plant seed factories at NEAs and maintain interplanetary transportation infrastructure at least as long as needed to allow space resources and infrastructure to be proven, so they can start replacing power generation and transmission industries on the planet with Solar Power Satellite systems, and replacing heavy polluting industries on the planet with space industries. No more power plants, mines, or refineries on the planet.
Use SPS power to produce H2 from seawater, to react with atmospheric CO2 to make CH4 (natural gas) for consumer & industrial fuel needs.

Build nuke power stations and bombs, to save the planet from heavy industry!

See www.marssociety.org for one organization which has the intention and stated purpose to kick-start exactly that. See Zubrin on public enthusiasm for Mars: the number of people who hit the NASA pathfinder mission website in the week the probe landed being greater than the number of people who vote -greater than the number of people actively either for or against a balanced budget, campaign finance reform, gun control, and abortion combined!
CBS bought the exclusive rights to the Atlanta Olympics for $2 billion... and see this article for more such ideas. "Those who think it's not possible should get out of the way of those who are doing it" --Chinese proverb

With nearly 50% of the mass in LEO being cargo to Mars on a 6 week trajectory?!? Show a single shred of evidence for believing that kind of breakthrough is physically possible -with sunlight... (and I said routine, robust & rugged, above all rapid human space travel.)

Only because as you said, they've not made a large, goal-oriented human space program part of their goals.
Chemicals may be fine for sending probes on multi-year trajectories.
And probes are not the best for planetary exploration.
NASA did a study: planetologists studied an interesting and varied area of the Mohave and catalogued all the interesting finds and the conclusions to be made from that evidence. They next released several other teams of scientists to study that patch of desert through telerobotics. Truly dismal results.
Zubrin wrote that you can hardly hike through the Rocky Mountains without finding a good area to search for and find fossils, but you could drop a thousand rovers into the Rockies and they wouldn't find a fossil until the next ice age -and they wouldn't be able to outrun the glaciers.
Carol stoker did a presentation on this at the 1st M.S. conference: she showed images from Sagan Memorial Station (the pathfinder lander) showiwng some interesting geologicalclues the cameras could see. The rover had no hope of ever getting to these rocky outcrops a couple of km away, but a human could have strolled over to them within an hour of landing there.

Correction: the people who've spent long times in zero G have been screwed over. Hard, and without lubricant.

The US astronaut Shannon Lucid is usually taken as an example that you can live in zero G. Sure, she walked off the Shuttle, but she still suffered serious bad effects, and she's probably still not back up to her original calcium levels, and her immune system is still probably not recovered, nor her heart, blood cell count, etc. Others who've spent longer times are in worse shape.

As I said, we have no proof whatsoever that low G won't be harmful. Only wishful thinking and hopes say that we'll be able to live & be healthy in low G, and it's irresponsible to speak as if we know for certain, and to fail to plan as if we'll need to provide full G.
Space colonies are taken as a far out solution: contrary, they are the conservative approach. Any other option stipulates satisfactory solutions to things about which we have nothing at all in solid evidence.

> in my opinion, to build an interplanetary colony would
be wasting time and resources that we would better be
exploiting by living on the planets the resources come from.

In your opinion. Let's see references to peer-reviewed scientific papers you've written about the subject. Have you successfully refuted the findings of the 1970s NASA space settlement studies? (not even Zubrin, who comes right out and ridicules the space settlement concept can say this)

As well, you seem to say that we'll mine planets, to build space colonies. Nowhere did I give that impression, and I challenge anyone to show a serious source for that opinion. Asteroids and small moons. Low or practically zero gravity, endless cheap solar energy.

Asteroids are the prime area for colonies off-Earth. Easy access to resources, easy access to energy, convenient access to the nearby space colony, where the people live in better conditions than they'll get on any other planet besides Earth (and better conditions than some of the Earth as well)

"a new colony between planets" isn't going to solve Earth's population problems certainly. Neither is any number of planetary colonies (small, weak, and starving, since they're limited to the surface of an inhospitable planet, and there are only a few planets even remotely suitable)
How about millions or billions of interplanetary colonies? all the way from the orbit of Mercury to the Oort cloud (all it takes is mirror)
Actually, that's the wrong way to look at it. It's a silly concept to think of shipping vast amounts of people off-planet in sardine can ships to space colonies. Rather, access to space resources will eventually allow us to raise the standard of living of everyone to lower the population growth rates. When everyone on Earth has a standard of living better than all but the richest of today (resources from space, no heavy industry on the planet) population growth will fall, and eventually maybe stabilize with only a few billion on the planet, with hundreds of billions more living in space and occasionally visiting the enormous wilderness park the Earth has become.

soph (Dec. 18 02) 
> the public doesnt like nuclear power.  so, lets say
we send up an orion-class ship piecemeal with HLV's.
> then, we have a facility put the parts together (it
could be designed to have parts that fit together, duh).

Big parts. To Orion standard, they're built tough & big. Fasteners are huge nuts & bolts, easily handled in suit gloves.
The ship itself is designed sectionally, so the crew can take it apart at the destination asteroid. The habs and shop tools they lived with on the way out become part of the base they're building.
The facility which assembles the ship is actually parts of the ship itself! Habitation, EVA prep, tool handling, cranes  & winches & arms etc.
Again, a carnival ride arrives packaged in a trailer. Certain parts come out first, to make steps & ladders for the workers to climb around on. The motors which drive the ride help winch parts together. Designed so people can make money without requiring engineering degrees from the workers, parts are big, dumb & simple.
After the show's over (all the money fleeced out of the marks), the parts go back to being ladders & scaffolds to take the thing down, pack it all away usisng the parts themselves to hold the trailer load together, and off it rolls.

> we send up the nuclear fuel and engines such
that they are not active, and can't affect the
environment (i dont know if nuclear fuel can be
frozen?).

Nuclear 'fuel' is a metal. Very dense, a golf ball weighs about a kilo.
Specially shaped so that chemical explosives ram it together to make it temporarily just a bit more dense, so the neutrons bouncing around in it make it go BOOM! (see your local terrorist or high school physics whiz kid for details).
This application of nuclear technology -bomb making- is put to special use in an Orion, to vaporize a propellant mixture. Water or plastic can be used in some cases, but tungsten is preferred for low bulk. This propellant is shot towards the ship's pusher plate, where the reaction of the impact pushes the ship forward. Only nuclear explosives can make the propellant hit the ship with enough energy to make an effective interplanetary drive.
So, each pulse unit (small, specially designed nuclear explosive device -one of hundreds to make the mission go) is the mechanism and structure to make it all work correctly, a big chunk of propellant, and the actual radioactive stuff of the nuclear fuel.
The propellant itself is over 2/3 of the mass (which bodes well for refueling for the return trip, at the destination). The plutonium 'pit' of the bomb is less than 10% of the bombs mass.
At launch out of the Earth's environment, we don't worry about the structure & mechanism or the propellant. We package it like any other part of the ship.
The tiny, heavy plutonium parts we take care of like they were our babies... Worth more than gold or platinum, very dangerous in the wrong hands (like W or the Pentagon), stable and damage resistant itself, but causing nightmares to the ignorant sector of the population who get bad dreams at the very mention of the word "radiation".
Remember that the crew of the Challenger survived the breakup of the orbiter. The impact with the ocean, 2.5 minutes later killed them.
We package the Pu bits specially so they'll fall away from a breaking up booster, re-enter the atmosphere at sub-orbital speeds, and make a hole in the ground -or better yet, deploy 'chutes & airbags to (relatively)gently land them.

> obviously, this takes out the HLV aspect of
nuclear vehicles, but it still allows them to have
great benefits as interplanetary ships.

Actually, it lets them focus on interplanetary travel, which is where they're really needed. Chemical can get us to LEO. It's totally false to say that chemical must be as bad as the Shuttle. Plenty of intelligent design choices can be made (just not in a government program) to lower costs and increase reliability.

To be fair, I'll add this.
I'm still moderately in favor of trying to build a field-deployable system of missiles, but I see no cause for the rush that our pal Shrub is in. Every time -every time the techies are rushed by teh politicians & money-men, things don't work, and they never listen to the techs.