Comments on: Nuclear powered jets?

By: podrock

podrock — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 14:49:12 +0000

Welcome back aboard the HZ-Wordpress, Hank.

I’ve fixed your settings to enable you to edit your posts. Of course, the honor code applies to editing posts.

By: hank

hank — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 12:58:54 +0000

One offshoot of the nuclear bomber program VelociraptorBlade mentions below was a nuclear powered rocket, which was successfully tested several times in the 60s. A coolant (liquid hydrogen) was flushed through a
compact fission reactor and expelled as a propellant for thrust. It was very efficient, yielding specific velocities about twice as high as liquid hydrogen-oxygen combustion. Except for the weight of the reactor, it was our most promising form of rocket propulsion at the time.

Fortunately, the inherent contamination dangers of this technology eventually led to its abandonment. Still, I can see this power plant design being used as a second stage for sending big payloads on manned planetary missions, where potential radioactive exhaust or accident debris would pose no threat to Earth’s biosphere. The engine could be assembled and fueled in low earth orbit and the effects of an accident would be minimized. (Except for the crew!).

By: Eri

Eri — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 11:52:21 +0000

I thought it might be one way to guarantee some country you were overflying would NOT try to shoot you down. “Oh well, we shot down the US’s nukejet and now Moscow is uninhabitable for the next thousand years.

“Oh and by the way, we haven’t recovered Putin’s body to give him a proper send-off.”

By: VelociraptorBlade

VelociraptorBlade — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 06:24:13 +0000

These things were conceived of back in the Cold War; and were discarded as soon as ballistic missiles were invented. The rationale behind not introducing them into modern day aircraft (and damn fine rationale it is) is that if it had an accident, we’d have more radioactive messes to clean up. Don’t even get me started on applying it to civilian aircraft. Plus, nowadays you can’t even JOKE about sending military planes towards Russia nowadays, let alone nuclear powered ones. I highly doubt the rest of the planet would be more reciprocating to nuclear ramjets shooting around.

“That radioactive crater you have? It was caused by a plane, NOT a missile, so, y’now, that was TOTALLY not intentional. Please don’t nuke us.”