Ares and Ares

Tom Kalbfus · 2006-08-30 12:04:01

But if you were to launch Orion into orbit with chemical rockets, this limits the practical size of the pusher plate, and eliminates all its advantages over other nuclear rockets with far cheaper and less controvertial fuel. The NSWR engine could easily out-perform a "mini" Orion, and GCNR would match it. The former powerd by Uranium Nitrate or Bromide and water with the latter powerd by plain old liquid Hydrogen. Plus these options, particularly GCNR, would not have an extremely massive pusher plate and shock absorber, radically improving their payload versus Orion. Not to mention that if you could refuel either NSWR or GCNR rockets using water or Hydrogen from other planets, you could increase their payload even more. And did I mention that there would be no political "fallout" from putting a working nuclear bomb launcher in orbit?
Landing Orion is a bigger problem then you make it sound too, a steel pusher plate would literally melt from the heat of reentry, plus it is all the wrong shape if you intend to use it as a heat shield. Bringing a heat shield big enough to protect the whole vehicle, including the big wide pusher plate, would be quite heavy and eliminate even more of Orion's supposed efficiency.
If you intend to use the pusher plate as the heat shield, this has several more problems: it would probably have to be made with an ablative coating to protect it from the heat, but this coating would burn off from normal "operation" of the engine. Replacing and refurbishing this shield would be difficult as it would be quite radioactive from the neutron flux or embedded daughter particles from the bombs. X-33 managed to get away with a lighter reuseable shield because it was so light compared to its volume, the opposit of Orion.
It is also all the wrong shape, you would want a shield that is fairly convex as it faces the atmosphere, but to efficiently "catch" the plasma wave from the bombs it has to be concave. Making it concave would produce a "hot spot" in the middle that would melt through just about anything I bet, and increase the deceleration rate to dangerous levels.
Parachutes would also be a problem, as your speed drops from orbital the heat shield would be less effective at slowing you down, so you would need parachutes. Too bad the parachutes would have to be rediculously large to slow down something the weight of Orion. Certainly bigger than a sports stadium.
And thats just to get you down. Why should we bother with this again?

First of all, I didn't say anything about the chemical booster lifting the Orion into orbit. I said it would lift the Orion into space. If the Orion didn't begin working after being liften into space, it would fall back into the Atmosphere. Wasn't it you who said their was a factor of 32 in the amount of energy required to lift something into space as compared to boosting it into orbit? This fact makes the bottom stage much more recoverable as it doesn't have to bleed off orbital velocity as it drops back into the atmosphere. What the Orion needs it to be lifted into space and be given just enough time as it is falling so it can seperate from the bottom stage and activate its nuke drive. The bottom booster will probably want to get as far away from the Orion as quickly as possible before the bombs start going off. One the Orion bombs start pushing, the spaceship can increase in altitude from their and either attempt to go into orbit or attempt an escape trajectory, it needs to accelerate at more than one earth's gravity to make progress as the thing does not start out in Earth orbit.

The Orion would need to be lifted off its pad anyway before it can start its nuke drive, if its just sitting on the pad when it drops its nuke, the nuke will just hit the ground underneathe the pusher plate and explode. The explosion between the ground and the pusher plate would destroy the launch pad, producing all kinds of shrapnel, it would be too close to the pusher plate which wouldn't be able to take it, and the Orion spaceship would simply explode leaving a debis littered crater where the launch pad and spaceship used to be. I think the original scientists who worked on the Orion project recongized that the Orion would have to be lifted some distance off the pad before it could start its nuke drive, it was never envisions that nukes would get the ship off the pad.

The main consideration is how high the bottom stage should lift the Orion before the bombs start to go off. A booster can lift it a mile and the Orion could begin there. The booster could lift it 10 miles and the Orion could begin there. Or the Booster can lift it 100 miles, 200 miles, or 400 miles and the Orion can begin after the Booster cuts off and seperates. The important thing to remember is that when the Orion starts, it is not moving laterally with relationto the Earth's surface. The booster drops straight down to the Earth's surface, and the velocity at which it enters the Earth's atmosphere depends on the maximum altitude it obtains after engin cutoff. The Orion too would fall straight down if its bombs don't explode. That is the system I'm talking about.

And what about the Pusher Plate, could it not be flipped over so that convex becomes concave and vice versa. Both sides of the plate could be covered in heat shielding for instance. Also the Orion might use some of its bombs to bleed off some of its orbital energy before entering the Earth's atmosphere and thus the atmospheric stress on the rest of the spaceship. There are many ways to use the Orion principle, in a vacuum, it doesn't matter whether its speeding up or slowing down.

Tom Kalbfus · 2006-08-30 12:20:08

I read this type article before
http://www.rattlesnake.com/notions/chinese-orion.html
I'm not sure how much is true and how much is alarmist hype
but a Chinese Project Orion would certainly get people's attention

Whats the point of building an atomic bomb spaceship if all you want to do is nuke your enemy with those atomic bombs? Its much easier just to build the bombs alone, and not build the Orion spaceship. The kind of bombs you'd want to use in anycase would be thermo-nuclear devices, not the fission devices used by Orion. An Orion Starship would use thermo-nuclear devices, but that would be too big to launch from the ground.

Why would China build a spaceship to conquer just a pesky little Island in the Pacific? Don't they have naval warships that can reach that point. It seems that if Conquering Taiwan was their goal, it would make much more sense to build Naval Warships than an Orion spaceship. Orion spaceships are for conquering the Solar System, other parts of Earth can be attacked much more effectively without using spaceships propelled by atomic bombs. Besides an Orion spaceship can't stop our retaliation by conventional nuke tipped missiles and other delivery devices. If China ever decided to attack the United States with an Orion, it would find that Mutually Assured Destruction was still very much in effect.

Your right this is just military paranoia. The purpose of an Orion is to use weapons of war, fission bombs, to do something useful other than to wage war on our enemies, for some reason, peacenik groups find this distasteful, they'd rather just use nukes to blow up cities or to threaten to blow them up, I find this to be such a waste of their potential.

dicktice · 2006-08-30 16:03:39

Tom: If getting there first means anything, the U.S. now owns the Moon already. The nearside hemisphere, at least. Ridiculous, you say?? No more than your contention regarding China being first someplace else revolving around the Sun.

Austin Stanley · 2006-08-30 16:32:00

I read this type article before
http://www.rattlesnake.com/notions/chinese-orion.html
I'm not sure how much is true and how much is alarmist hype
but a Chinese Project Orion would certainly get people's attention
Whats the point of building an atomic bomb spaceship if all you want to do is nuke your enemy with those atomic bombs? Its much easier just to build the bombs alone, and not build the Orion spaceship. The kind of bombs you'd want to use in anycase would be thermo-nuclear devices, not the fission devices used by Orion. An Orion Starship would use thermo-nuclear devices, but that would be too big to launch from the ground.

No it makes LOTS of sense militarily to put bombs in space, Orion or otherwise. The US (and Russia for that matter) defense/detection systems are all dedicated to tracking weapons that follow a pretty set patern of balistic orbital paths. Over the north poll primarily. This gives the nuclear powers some time to ready their own strategic forces and launch counterstrikes, making MAD (and the deterent it provides) possible.

Orion changes all that. Put a nuke in actual orbit and you could theorticaly bring it down however you like, without giving your target a chance to see it coming and retaliate. This allows you to "win" a nuclear war. Obviously all the other nuclear powers are none to thrilled with this thought.

Their fears are not entirely groundless. I won't speculate on any of the nuclear powers desire to proceded with such an option, but any Orion type vehicle could certianly pull it off. They are designed to lift hundreads to thousands of H-bombs into orbit. Once in orbit Orion should have the Delta-V to go whereever it likes. And the containment vessles for the bombs could easily double as re-entery vehicles.

The Russians developed a similar system in the past, the fractional orbit bombardment system, which was designed to launch such a strike, but thankfully was never deployed.

So I belive that for political reasons alone are killer for Orion. The engineering difficulties are just a bonus.

Tom Kalbfus · 2006-08-31 09:12:02

I'm telling you, an Orion spaceship is one very expensive ICBM, and it can only visit one target at a time while all the other missile bases will be launching missiles at your home country. An Orion spaceship was no way of stoping all of those missiles, and the Orion itself can be blown up by a single thermo nuclear device, it is very vulnerable especially with all those armamants concentrated in on place.

GCNRevenger · 2006-08-31 18:56:56

Launching Orion above the atmosphere vertically sounds like a good idea but it has many problems: in order for Orion to be efficient its pusher plate must be quite wide, which is the exact opposit of a narrow/pointy rocket needs for efficient flight through the atmosphere. Since the chemical rocket doing the lauching will spend all of its time in the atmosphere versus only a fraction of acent like orbital rockets, the associated mass penalty will be quite signifigant. Apollo was only 10m wide and the tip of the rocket under a meter, while the full-sized Orion would be 41m wide, a full seventeen times larger cross section.

Astronautix article on Orion, the bullet-shaped one

The second is reliability, that a reuseable rocket with the kind of thrust would require an awful lot of engines even if it didn't need lots of fuel, and if they failed it is questionable if Orion could survive the fall, and loaded with live nukes too. I am sure we could make bombs safe enough so they wouldn't detonate, but I have doubts about preventing them from going critical. Also, these bombs will use Plutonium and not Uranium, where contaminants therein are non-trivially radioactive. The height you would have to achieve so the bombs would not be hazardous is rather high, and so you would still need a very sizeable chemical rocket, easily the same scale as Saturn-V.

And no, you can't put an ablator heat shield on one side of the plate and flip it over: the plate has to be very firmly attached to the ship in order for it not to fall off when the shock absorbers rebound against it. Furthermore, the hinges required to hold the plate would have to be outside of it, and thus be cooked both by bomb blasts and reentry. Furthermore, there would be no way to quickly switch from propulsion to heat shield modes in the event of a course correction before reentry/aerobraking.

But most importantly, why go through all the trouble? Look, look at the above link... the huge 10,000MT 41m wide Orion, in all its glory without chemical boosters, not the smaller 100MT 10m version riding on chemical rockets...

...would only have 3000sec Isp. Thats it. The smaller 10m version would hardly top 2000sec. While these numbers are pretty high compared to chemical or solid-core nuclear engines, they are at best middling and at worst paltry compared to other advanced nuclear fission drives. Even against chemical engines, a huge chemical rocket like NOVA or SeaDragon might be cheaper and certainly less conrovertial. Also keep in mind that Orion would have to lug the heavy steel or copper plate and shock absorber around, which effectively reduces its efficiency even more.

There are alternatives, better ones:

~My personal favorite, the elegant and clever Gas Core Nuclear Rocket (GCNR), has high thrusts and an Isp of around 3000-5000sec in theory, and uses only small amounts of Uranium to heat Hydrogen, making in-space refueling easier and reducing the nuclear fuel required.
~Zubrin's Nuclear Salt Water Rocket (NSWR) uses a concentrated Uranium solution (uranium salt dissolved in water) that achieves criticality if enough volume is brought together. Squirt it out the back with a pump and let it go, and it is much like a continuous-burn Orion. Except it gets Isp's of up to 10,000sec thanks to the water. Bob may have exaggerated this figure a little, but I doubt by huge amounts, plus this fuel would be very dense and could be refueled by water found anywhere in the solar system.
~VCR-VASIMR, a closed-cycle vapor core reactor feeds electrical and perhaps ionizing radiation engergies to a magneto-plasma rocket. Modest thrusts with Isp up to 10,000sec and burns Hydrogen, plus generates a strong magnetic field that might shield a ship from cosmic rays, solar flares, or Jupiters' radiation belts. Oh and lots of power for the ship too.

Orion is impressive, but it just doesn't have an edge over better solutions unless it is much bigger. Again, the SIZE of Orion is critical, that unless it is truely huge, fractions of kilometer in diameter at least, then it has no advantage over other engines in efficiency.

Orion has one and only one advantage, and that is if it is used to launch truely huge masses from the surface. And since you can't do that from the fallout, what good is it? If you use a big chemical rocket to lift Orion to the edge of the atmosphere inefficiently, you might as well use the same rocket efficently with a chemical upper stage to launch into orbit with no nuclear propulsion at all.

GCNRevenger · 2006-08-31 19:30:21

I'm telling you, an Orion spaceship is one very expensive ICBM, and it can only visit one target at a time while all the other missile bases will be launching missiles at your home country. An Orion spaceship was no way of stoping all of those missiles, and the Orion itself can be blown up by a single thermo nuclear device, it is very vulnerable especially with all those armamants concentrated in on place.

No it isn't vunerable. Its extremely high thrust and efficiency makes it maneuverable, and it could easily dodge any weapon thrown at it. And zap it with a laser? The pusher plate is designed to withstand the heat of an atomic bomb blast more or less continuously, shrugging off a laser for a few minutes ought to be easy.

Furthermore, there is very little that separates a 1KT nuclear bomb from a 300KT one once you add the tamper/fuel fusion section, and at a dispensing rate of 4+ warheads per second it would be possible to incinerate an entire country in minutes from the first launch.

I agree that it doesn't really change the ballence of a MAD doctern, but it is a frighteningly powerful weapon, and it will frighten powerful people, who would surely put a stop to it.

And then you have the cost... again:

~Super reliable, super light weight made-for-Orion bombs would have to be developed and produced in vast numbers, more than the nuclear arsenals of the Earth for regular use
~Feeder mechanism would be one of the most complicated mechanical devices ever built
~Remote basing and handling of the hence-radioactive ship would be very difficult logistically

Really, the cost of a small arsenal of nukes on every flight is enough to rule out Orion from the start alone. The cost of all the fuel that Shuttle, Saturn-V, even SeaDragon is less than the price of a single Orion bomb most likely.

John Creighton · 2006-08-31 20:58:08

I think Orion should be launched from the sea because the ocean currents would help to disperse and dilute any radioactive waste produced. Also if it is in the middle of the ocean we don’t have to worry about the exhaust having a direct effect on any cities. Perhaps the pusher plate could be coupled to the capsule by closet packed buoyant spheres.

RedStreak · 2006-08-31 22:28:03

I think Orion should be launched from the sea because the ocean currents would help to disperse and dilute any radioactive waste produced.

Good luck eating sea food without dying from radiation AND food poisoning. You might as well have suggested blasting off from the praries or farmlands.

John Creighton · 2006-09-01 00:10:40

I think Orion should be launched from the sea because the ocean currents would help to disperse and dilute any radioactive waste produced.
Good luck eating sea food without dying from radiation AND food poisoning. You might as well have suggested blasting off from the praries or farmlands.

How bad can it be. People live today where the Hiroshima bomb was dropped. The oceans are a heck of a lot bigger then Japan.

John Creighton · 2006-09-01 00:13:28

Would you want a steal plate for Orion? Lead absorbs radiation better right. Of course Led melts at low temperatures. I wonder what metals you can mix with lead to raise the melting point.

GCNRevenger · 2006-09-01 04:58:20

It doesn't matter where you launch it from, it still has to travel through the atmosphere to reach orbit, detonating bombs low enough that dispersion of the fallout cloud would not be sufficient.

Again, why Orion? There are better nuclear engines once you get into orbit, ones that use fuel that isn't totally insane. Yes yes I know the use of nukes for propulsion sounds like such a great idea and seems like it should be so awsome and the performance so superior, but again it really is not. For all the "huff and puff" from those bombs, only a small fraction of their mass ever makes it to the pusher plate, and since there is so little of it... just a little wiff of plasma despite its high energy, it really isn't that great. Its only real advantage for ships of practical size is its tremendous lift capacity from the surface.

The cost of all these bombs is also larger than it seems: the cost of nukes is not common knowledge, so it doesn't seem to bother Orion advocates. I tell you that the warheads needed would bankrupt any space program that employed it, even with Apollo-scale funding. Can you imagine the amount of infrastructure needed to support bomb manufacturing on that scale, so that you would have enough to launch regularly? A large increase in world Uranium mining, huge UF6 centrifuge facilities, fuel processing/reprocessing factories, multiple Plutonium breeder reactors, the actual bomb labs, and finally what to do with all the waste to support the production of dozens of tonnes of bomb-grade Plutonium anually. Its just too much, it is such a huge number that Orion cheerleaders refuse to think about it.

Tom Kalbfus · 2006-09-01 08:54:01

Ever consider launching it from the ground in the middle of Antartica? So maybe the equator is more economical because of the Earth's spin, but you can still launch a ship into orbit from the South Pole. You could give the Orions names like Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Armageddon. And whos to say we couldn't build nuclear bombs more efficiently. An Orion spaceship can probably reach the asteroids easily enough if it can reach Saturn, it can conduct asteroid mining operations and extract Uranium from the asteroids. I'm sure heavy metals such as Uranium would be more plentiful in space than on Earth anyway, that stuff would've sunk to the Earth's cored when it was molten anyway.

Tom Kalbfus · 2006-09-01 09:24:22

It doesn't matter where you launch it from, it still has to travel through the atmosphere to reach orbit, detonating bombs low enough that dispersion of the fallout cloud would not be sufficient.
Again, why Orion? There are better nuclear engines once you get into orbit, ones that use fuel that isn't totally insane. Yes yes I know the use of nukes for propulsion sounds like such a great idea and seems like it should be so awsome and the performance so superior, but again it really is not. For all the "huff and puff" from those bombs, only a small fraction of their mass ever makes it to the pusher plate, and since there is so little of it... just a little wiff of plasma despite its high energy, it really isn't that great. Its only real advantage for ships of practical size is its tremendous lift capacity from the surface.
The cost of all these bombs is also larger than it seems: the cost of nukes is not common knowledge, so it doesn't seem to bother Orion advocates. I tell you that the warheads needed would bankrupt any space program that employed it, even with Apollo-scale funding. Can you imagine the amount of infrastructure needed to support bomb manufacturing on that scale, so that you would have enough to launch regularly? A large increase in world Uranium mining, huge UF6 centrifuge facilities, fuel processing/reprocessing factories, multiple Plutonium breeder reactors, the actual bomb labs, and finally what to do with all the waste to support the production of dozens of tonnes of bomb-grade Plutonium anually. Its just too much, it is such a huge number that Orion cheerleaders refuse to think about it.

But with Orions, we are not limited to mining only this world for Uranium. I think Antartica is sufficiently barren to conduct launches from the surface. The problem is, all your ideas for alternatives start from low Earth orbit. I don't know if the nuclear salt water rocket can launch from the ground, or whether it would be less or more radioactive that exploding nuclear bombs. You can imagine alot of things starting from low Earth orbit. Remember that opening sequence of 2001 A Space Odyssey? (after the apes) You had this giant wheel of a space station and the Pan Am Space plane maneuving to meet it. Lots of things can be constructed in low Earth orbit, but the problem is getting there. If you just hand wave and say "Once we get into low earth orbit what do we do? Gerard O'Neill did quite a bit of that, but the stumbling block as always been launch vehicles. O'Neill's plan depended upon space shuttles that could launch once every 10 days at performance levels promised by NASA in the 1970s, and the only thing you threw away was that large external tank that was cheap to manufacture at any rate, everything else was recoverable so people equated that at the time with cheap. So what do you think, does everything depend on building a Space Elevator if we can't launch Orions from the ground? Chemical rockets seem to have bombed out miserably, they can't launch anything cheaply, the fuel to mass ratio is too great. Scramjets are always on the drawing board, single stage to orbit vehicles never get off the ground. It is hard to imagine cheap and reliable ground to orbit transportation with chemical rockets. I keep on hearing, "Oh we could have done that and be in space by now, but the politicians, and the "keep people on Earth" Green Environmentalists wouldn't let us," and we must always be oh so so politically correct, even if it means we are stuck on Earth for the next 100 years and have to spend money fending off Islamic fundamentalists instead. Me, I'd rather leave the primitives on this primitive planet. Let all the superstitious people blow themselves up and prostrate themselves to God all while pretending the Earth is flat and all the planets are glued to celestial spheres. We can ditch these cavemen who don't belive in evolution and move to the stars, but the only thing holding us back are these expensive launch vehicles that keep us glued firmly to Terra Firma.

dicktice · 2006-09-01 09:30:12

I guess we're going to have to differentiate in our posts from now on, between Orion-type (atomic bomb propulsion) ships and the new Orion capsule-type (chemical rocket propulsion) ships to be built for NASA by Lockheed. What's it to be, I wonder?

GCNRevenger · 2006-09-01 10:59:11

Ever consider launching it from the ground in the middle of Antartica?

Are you even reading what you are saying? And Antarctica is not some magical safe zone in the atmosphere, the radioactivity would still spread. The very first nuclear space accident was when a Pu-238 RTG burned up in the atmosphere, and its fuel spread a few kilos of the stuff over the entire Pacific ocean. The waste from an Orion bomb is far more radioactive than Pu-238. And Antarctica? Please, it would be so hard to work there, that you would still not save money versus big chemical rockets. Ten Saturn-V/Ares-V, or only a few SeaDragons would give you the same lift.

And whos to say we couldn't build nuclear bombs more efficiently

I am saying; there is a minimum amount of fuel you need for a bomb to reach criticality even with a neutron reflecting radiation case and a neutron source in the core. You can't really make bombs more efficient, since the fuel only "burns" while the bomb is still in once piece, but its doesn't stay together very long.

Making bombs with very small yeild efficient is also difficult, and again is basically taking a full-sized "big" atomic bomb and inhibiting the reaction so it won't blow the pusher plate to bits. Slowing down the reaction reduces the bombs' efficiency alot. If it were practical to make even more efficient bombs, we would have already done so, since an efficient big bomb is even easier than an efficient little bomb, and would today sit on top of USAF/USN missiles.

it can conduct asteroid mining operations and extract Uranium from the asteroids. I'm sure heavy metals such as Uranium would be more plentiful in space than on Earth anyway, that stuff would've sunk to the Earth's cored when it was molten anyway.

Orion isn't efficient enough, you would use up more Plutonium carting around that Uranium ore than you could get out of that ore in the first place! Look, I know its hard to accept, but this is the simple truth: Orion is not radically more efficient than chemical rockets. It isn't!

Do you have any idea how much ore you would have to harvest to produce dozens if not hundreds of tonnes of bomb grade plutonium? Or the industrial base needed to turn it from ore into bombs? Obviously not if you are suggesting such a thing. You need ore crushers, chemical separators to remove the Uranium, purification to the metal, fuel element fabrication, followed by a long soak in a breeder reactor, Uranium/Waste/Plutonium separation (very hazardous), Plutonium metal extraction, maybe Plutonium isotropic separation (ditto), and finally only then can you talk bombs. We aren't doing this in space this century for sure. Oh and you'd need loads of graphite and heavy water too probably.

Orion is not the answer, even the Earth's supply of Uranium could not operate a fleet of them for very long, even despite the costs. Space Uranium mining is a pipe dream too, not that it would gain you anything, since you'd use more of it getting the Uranium than you would recieve from the mining. One of the big problems with Orion is that the reaction mass is almost all Plutonium, while other nuclear rockets use less fuel (NSWR uses water with Uranium Bromide) or even no fuel as reaction mass (VASIMR). Every time you want to go some place with Orion, you have to burn lots of Plutonium.

Chemical rockets are what we have, and we could still go a long way with them: the reason we haven't is not so much because we can't, but rather because nobody has wanted to. We could make two-stage space plane with efficiency comperable to what Shuttle should have been today if we really wanted to, but without a good place to fly it to nobody has built one. No scramjets required, just jets and rockets.

Edit: Or even massive expendable chemical rockets, like NOVA or SeaDragon, could match the lift of Orion in only a few shots. Surely they would cost less to develop than Orion's hyper-complex feeder mechanism and super-reliable nukes, and likely cost less to launch than needing a sizeable arsenal of nukes even if Orion was free to reuse.

EuroLauncher · 2006-09-01 12:07:34

How bad can it be. People live today where the Hiroshima bomb was dropped. The oceans are a heck of a lot bigger then Japan.

The Hiroshima bomb was very weak by today's standards, but it still managed to kill anywhere between 110,000-210,000 men, women and Japanese children depending on whose accounts you are reading and if you take the radiation sickness and birth defects into consideration.
Most of Hiroshima was totally destroyed, an entrie city leveled and the people who survived there sometimes still live as atomic outcasts in Japan, also know as 'Hiba-kusha' outcasts.
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Japan/Victim2.jpg
Today mankind has been building weapons Thousands of Times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, nuclear bombs which are tens of megaton like the Tsar bomb or other designs which were hundreds of megatons would be 7,100 times the 15 kiloton bomb detonated at Hiroshima.

John Creighton · 2006-09-01 12:36:50

How bad can it be. People live today where the Hiroshima bomb was dropped. The oceans are a heck of a lot bigger then Japan.
The Hiroshima bomb was very weak by today's standards, but it still managed to kill anywhere between 110,000-210,000 men, women and Japanese children depending on whose accounts you are reading and if you take the radiation sickness and birth defects into consideration.
Most of Hiroshima was totally destroyed, an entrie city leveled and the people who survived there sometimes still live as atomic outcasts in Japan, also know as 'Hiba-kusha' outcasts.
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Japan/Victim2.jpg
Today mankind has been building weapons Thousands of Times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, nuclear bombs which are tens of megaton like the Tsar bomb or other designs which were hundreds of megatons would be 7,100 times the 15 kiloton bomb detonated at Hiroshima.

I don’t doubt that large scale nuclear war would be seriously devastating but I can’t see any Orion type vehicle using a bomb bigger then Hiroshima. If anything it will use smaller bombs. Also we have tested these much larger bombs before and we are still here.

Tom Kalbfus · 2006-09-01 12:44:01

Chemical rockets are what we have, and we could still go a long way with them: the reason we haven't is not so much because we can't, but rather because nobody has wanted to. We could make two-stage space plane with efficiency comperable to what Shuttle should have been today if we really wanted to, but without a good place to fly it to nobody has built one. No scramjets required, just jets and rockets.
Edit: Or even massive expendable chemical rockets, like NOVA or SeaDragon, could match the lift of Orion in only a few shots. Surely they would cost less to develop than Orion's hyper-complex feeder mechanism and super-reliable nukes, and likely cost less to launch than needing a sizeable arsenal of nukes even if Orion was free to reuse.

If we built a really big expendable rocket, we could get all the stuff we wanted to in orbit in one shot, they'd just have to make the trip all at once. Taking the figures from the Orion Project, the largest structure that can be accelerated into Orbit would weigh 8,000,000 tons on the launch pad. 90 % of that would be rocket fuel, and that leaves us with a payload of about 800,000 tons in low Earth orbit.

Now is there anything that could be done with 800,000 tons in low Earth orbit that would make all subsequent trips into space cheaper? A Space elevator perhaps, ot maybe something to do with suborbiters and streams of pellets.

Mars_B4_Moon · 2006-09-01 12:48:17

Also we have tested these much larger bombs before and we are still here.

I agree that groups like Greenpeace go over the top but it isn't all pink and rosy as some so-called atomic scientists would lead you to believe, people are still dying. Nevada and New-Mexico have high levels of radioactive contamination, Chernobyl's thyroid cancer increased in eastern europe, French Polynesia and Moruroa have high cancer rates....these are just some of the negative impacts that nuclear testing had on the people of our planet.

GCNRevenger · 2006-09-01 15:00:14

What? Orion certainly can launch Hiroshima-class bombs, after all even the small version is slated to fire 10KT sized ones during "cruise" mode. I fully expect that the very same 10KT warheads could be dialed up to 50KT simply be removing the inhibitor that holds the yeild down. Also, adding a fusion secondary to increase the yeild from 50KT to around 150-300KT like the W80 and B61 warheads, or even 475KT like the W88.

Even at 50KT however, the ability to fire 4+ of these warheads PER SECOND is what makes it so frightening, that it could carpet state-sized areas with small bombs literally in seconds. It would be the ultimate terror weapon, invincible, able to anihilate entire nations with impunity. Or, for smaller tactical use, where "small scale nuclear war" falls, this would truely be the weapon to end all weapons.

Say a war between China, where tactical bombs are used but not the big strateigic warheads, Orion would be the ultimate weapon. MAD prevents Orion from winning strateigic wars, but it would be able to win ANY tactical-scale war, which gives makes it incredibly threatening.

Does it change MAD? No, but it is such a terrifying weapon strateigically and so powerful semi-tactically, that it would never be permitted.

John Creighton · 2006-09-01 15:05:38

I of course agree with you that it is politically unrealistic. I just think it is cool. 8) Thus I find the topic interesting.

GCNRevenger · 2006-09-01 16:08:38

When you think about it though, Orion does make sense as a weapons system if you intend to fight a war with tactical but not strateigic weapons, limited to military targets only.

Orion's maneuverability permits it to place itself in any orbit you want in minutes and avoid any chemical driven missile fired at it, the pusher plates' invunerability to directed energy weapons, combined with its large ammunition capacity and fire rate make it the uber weapon if you want to fight a "little" nuclear war.

Being that this is the only kind of nuclear war that anybody is really likely to fight any time soon, China using smaller nukes to combat more advanced American military forces and the in-kind retaliation thereof, Pakistan vs India with their relatively small bombs becoming a regional conflict, Iran vs America with Iran's puny bombs but urgent need to shut Iranian capability down to minimize damage... etc. Small nuclear wars.

China takes out USN carrier groups plus levels Guam, Diego Garcia, and Japanese air bases with medium and long range assets, and gets ready to flatten Taiwan with numerous short-range missiles? USSF (space force, heh) pushes the "attack" mode on the unmanned Orion "exploration vehicle" that proceeds to fire several hundred 1KT warheads and vaporize every single Chinese military base, naval warship, and above-ground ballistic missile base across the entirety of the Pacific and eastern Asia... in about ten minutes, before Taiwan's air defenses are overwhelmed.

To make matters even better is the shape of the Orion propulsion bomb... the Orion bombs are special because their radiation case is designed to focus and direct the blast, which further reduces collateral damage. A precsion nuke if you will... In this senario, the usefulness of Orion is obvious.

Tom Kalbfus · 2006-09-01 22:02:40

A more practical Orion would be one that used pure fusion bombs. I think the only find of fusion rocket that would work in Earth's atmosphere would be the pulse fusion variety. So the main trick here is to create a fusion trigger without fissionables. I think a good candidate would be stored antimatter. If you could get a small amount of antimatter to trigger a cascade fusion reaction that detonates all the fusion fuel within the bomb, then you would have no radioactives heavy elements left over, The antimatter is completely gone afterwards and the best thing about it is that antimatter/matter reactions have no critical mass requirements, you can annhilate any small amount.

RedStreak · 2006-09-02 01:32:34

I seem to recall this once being the Ares versus Ares forum, not the Orion Nuclear Starship forum.

Someone just mentioned the Orion being the CEV's offical name and then people steered the conversation like a herd of lemmings off a cliff....

Does this mean if I mention "bottlecap" in this forum that in two weeks people will be talking about 7UP and Cokes here?

*cough cough stay on track damn it cough*

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