I have an interesting political thought regarding space travel and I'd like to see what Sup Forums thinks. I think there's a lot of good reasons to consider this US election a critical one, but I think one of the most interesting arguments is that if we get Clinton, we probably get a war with Russia, BUT if we pick Trump we have a chance to work together with Russia. Can you imagine if Russia and the USA worked together to explore space? Imagine a new space race, with China vs USA & Russia, we would kick their asses.. and not only that, but it gives the potential for a previously impossible project to become a reality:
I've been entranced with the idea of Project Orion since I first heard about it a few years ago. For those that don't know, it was a project started in the US in the late 50s attempting to plan out a spacecraft utilizing a very unusual type of propulsion. For more detailed info watch either or both of these documentaries on JewTube, or read on for the clifnotes version
When they did the first atomic bomb tests in New Mexico, the bomb was placed on a steel tower. That tower was expected to be basically vaporized by the bast, but was mostly just blown apart by kinetic force, so the concept of using nuclear blasts to propel a spacecraft was thus born. Basically, the concept they developed was of a massive spacecraft with a giant 'pusher plate' shield with a small hole in the center. It would drop nuclear charges through said hole, these charges would explode, the pusher plate would absorb the impact in order to propel the craft, and hydralics would absorb the brunt of the force so that the occupants wouldn't get rekt, and then the process would be repeated until it reached the necessary velocity. Traditional rockets and RCS would be used to turn and pitch the massive craft, but the speeds it could generate using the nuclear pulse propulsion were estimated to top off in the area of 1/10th the speed of light (that's really fucking fast).
This ship would need to be quite large to accommodate a sufficiently large pusher plate/shield and to hold quite a few small nuclear charges, but it would be more than capable at exploring the outer solar system in a mere fraction of the time it would take to get there using traditional means. This thing could even reach the five nearest solar systems in a human lifetime, mostly red dwarves, but that list includes the Centauri system and the Sirius system, but this would almost certainly be a one way trip.
[2/3]
Carson Rodriguez
So why didn't we build this thing? First, its massive size and the fact that it would be leaving a trail of radiation behind it from a surface launch means it would probably have to built in orbit, but also.. it would have cost something like a trillion dollars (in the 60s) and for the more ambitious missions, a good portion of the US nuclear arsenal.
Technologies have come a long ways and this thing might not cost as much (taking into account inflation) but it can only be built if the world's first two nuclear powers and first two spacefaring nations joined forces.
That's a pretty goddamn good reason to vote Trump if you axe me, even if its just a possibility.
[3/3]
Jace Wright
>RUSSIA AND THE USA COULD CONQUER SPACE IF WE WERE FRIENDS
Didn't space exploration advance the most while russia and usa were enemies?
Not to be a dick but it seems that during peace times countries in europe and north america seem to just not try anymore ...
Aiden Thomas
I respect your doubles, but I'd say a space race is coming between the US and China whether we like it or not. This whole dick measuring thing in the South China sea is just the beginning, they're gonna start trying to do shit in space where we can't currently stop them.. China is already talking about a manned Mars mission.
This election really decides which side the Russians will be on in that upcoming space race (of course assuming WW3 doesn't break out instead)
Blake Cook
there's nothing out there
this universe is a simulation
the elites know this, that's why they don't give a fuck about the environment or colonizing "space"
Caleb Mitchell
When will space faggots realize that we will never colonize other planets? Its impossible.
Hunter Diaz
This is part of the reason why the jews killed JFK, he suggested the soviets and the US work together. The soviets would've accepted but he dieded and the soviet didn't trust the next few presidents.
Josiah Ross
of course it is, planets with weaker gravity than earth and no atmosphere are pretty shitty places to try and live but space stations with centrifugal-motion generated artificial gravity will be hella comfy.
The asteroids are a good reason we need to get into space. Rare metals like platinum and palladium can be found in amounts far greater than can be found on earth, as well as uranium and plutonium.
If humanity really wants to survive we have to get into space.
Christian Allen
The US could conquer space alone who needs Russia?
>muh ISS launching platform thing
America is building their own now, and it's going to be better.
Cooper Cruz
I respect your opinion my friend . I really do . And you may be right ,honestly, but I disagree.
Maybe i'm wrong but I see the next space race in east asia alone mostly a china-india-(maybe japan) space race thingy . Russia is already in economic crisis and is fortifying itself as best as possible...meaning that I don't see it going towards a science race...the fastests advancement for US's space program(and..indirectly the world's...since you guys are already at the top), would be a race to the top with the EU ,but we here in the EU love american dick ... so much that our own "eu completely democratically elected president" bent its knee to nato when russia attacked and begged it to help...amidst the fact that nukes aside member countries have ..together...a decent army ...
I don't honestly see russia involved ..that much anyway...hell...you actually have more chances to go in the asian one ...if trump gets elected due to trump's spite against china alone...so i guess you are right about the election thing.
Camden Nguyen
True space colonization can't happen until we invent a way to terraform planets. We'd have to change their magnetic fields and all sorts of crazy things. And, of course, there's the gravity problem.
Ian Gomez
dude.. Project Orion is too big for the US to build alone. We're talking about a spacecraft that could carry a crew of hundreds and have modules for multiple ISS sized stations to be set up as it goes along and flies to Saturn in a year or so. We're talking something that's almost 3x faster than what we have now and far more efficient. So far, this is the only method we've developed that can practically explore the outer solar system with manned missions.
I see what you're saying, maybe this idea is founded on overoptimistic idealism on my part, but a man can dream.. a man can dream..
I personally think that only Venus could be colonizable if we had the technology to chuck comets at it for a thousand years or something.. but I believe that centrifugal motion generating artificial gravity on large space stations is the way to go for humans living away form earth.
Of course, we'd have to start small and scale up, but if we were tapping into resources in space, it would help greatly
Luke Murphy
Project Orion makes me erect, and I can't believe it has been technically possible for so long. First found out about it from Carl Sagan's Cosmos and OP is probably right about a Russia-USA collaboration making it a reality. It's a cold war treaty that stopped it from being funded/built, if I remember correctly.
You guys should check out Space Engine. Sup Forums loves it but anyone who isn't aware of it should DEFINITELY check it out. It's a free program and you can explore the Universe in stunning detail. Google that shit
Xavier Reyes
I love it but my current computer can't run it, my old one could.. I just need to stop being so poor.
Kerbal Space Program had a mod a few patches back that was a super miniaturized version of Orion, speaking of space related vidyagames
There's a Scottish guy named Scott Manley who makes a shit ton of videos about that game
you might need to skip around a bit because there's slow parts but it's entertaining.. he eventually tries to make a giant plane using the nuclear pulse drive, shit makes me lol
Henry Gray
you're right about the cold war treaty blocking Project Orion, it was the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty which banned nuclear tests unless they were done underground, and explicitly banned them in space... basically this thing needed to be able to use nuclear bombs in space to go anywhere so that fucked everything
Dominic Morgan
you can't prove that though
Xavier Hernandez
Project Orion wouldn't work now because powering it through the upper atmosphere would cook every satellite in orbit for years.
We do not set off nukes in the ionosphere.
Chase Gray
that's why we build the thing in geosynchronous orbit, well away from any sattelites
launching it from earth would kill an average of like 20 people from the fallout
Noah Brown
But then you'd need to lift all that material into orbit using conventional rockets.
Nolan Parker
The human race a a whole would be a LOT further along if we managed to get our shit together and work as a collective species rather than spending time and money trying to screw each other.
Unfortunately we're not all equal and mostly selfish and greedy and all have different end goals, mostly rooted in past superstitions and religion.
Ideally we'd have some form of global nationalism, everyone being the best that they can be in their own right as a race/nationality, with a common direction as a whole species.
Luis Perez
Correct, but it's the only sane way to build such a monster.
Alexander Wright
Sounds kinda like the future envisioned in Star Trek
only thing is it takes a horrific nuclear war to get there in that universe
Ethan Torres
>that much tonnage lifted with conventional rockets >and then have to assemble something vastly bigger and more complicated than the ISS in space >doing the inspections and quality control in space >on the biggest and fastest spaceship in human history >if anything gets missed it goes kablooie
This idea is not a good one. It'd almost be better to build the thing on Earth, nuke it up into the stratosphere and then switch to conventional rockets to take it up and out through the EMP danger zone
Noah Fisher
Yea i always imagine where would we be if we would have an internazional organization where every country puts their money in for space exploration . I think we would be on MARS already
Mason Smith
The estimates for a manned mission to Mars is now one trillion dollars.
The estimated real estate value back in the year 2000 of new York city was 1.3 trillion. To show just how much money that is.
Project orion just can't be done, even with full cooperation between the US and Russia.
Carter Reyes
that's actually a pretty good idea, but it would need some MASSIVE boosters to help it along into orbit
Dylan Thompson
We're the best that evolution by natural selection could produce, really.
Our limits were written long ago.
Carter Reed
Okay so terraforming is basically impossible unless given a huge leap in tech.
Bur what about an elysium style habitat created in space? Like That could work right? It couldn't be too hard creating an artificial ecosystem right?
Ayden Perez
Big boosters would be easier than trying to assemble a giant spaceship in orbit from current-rocket-sized payloads and not have anything go horribly horribly wrong when they fired it up for the first time.
Oliver Myers
This whole thread is lies
John James
No, it wouldn't. Orion is the heaviest lifting thing possible. A 1959 Orion design could send 1,300 fucking tons to Saturn and back.
Falcon 9 can get a whole 5 tons to GEO.
Aiden Gonzalez
FDR didn't want to be enemies with Stalin. Nobody got the memo until after he died, and it was too late.
Hudson Mitchell
Well we tried it in my home state of Arizona in the biodome.. long story short, it didn't go so well, but it's only been tried twice and had a very liberal political backing so they didn't use anything but what they grew and it broke down for bullshit reality TV reasons as well.
It's theoretically possible but we do have some work to do to first.
my bad, clearly I didn't do the math.. but holy shit that's a lot of tons, sometimes I forget how hardcore Orion is
Ayden Taylor
flat earth, hollow earth, the matrix?
what's your angle, mr.leaf?
Lucas Torres
>when russia attacked Russia never attacked the EU...
Cooper Turner
>doesn't know much
If you did hybrid NP/rockets, the NP would get the thing moving fast and high, and rockets would only be fired to keep it from losing too much momentum heading through the EMP danger zone.
Falcon 9's thrust would be more than sufficient to keep a really big fast thing at 50km altitude going in the right direction and speed. Not so much to get it off the ground.
Connor Torres
>If you did hybrid NP/rockets, the NP would get the thing moving fast and high, and rockets would only be fired to keep it from losing too much momentum heading through the EMP danger zone.
That's a tremendous waste of money. They would have everyone turn everything off. It's not like we'd ever want to launch more than one of these things.
Matthew Reed
I might have to do some (delta)Δv calculations because I'm wondering whether or not this is possible
Jacob Powell
Fuck that hippy bullshit
Liam Roberts
If we ever managed to build 2 we could send one of each on a generational journey to Sirius and Centauri.. the latter would take like 50 years and the former just shy of 70 lol
the fact is if we did build something like this, the technological advancements we made in the process would probably be quite glorious and would improve society while bringing us ever closer to being able to do things on an interstellar scale.
much obliged, good info here.. also the idea of launching it from the north or south pole is pretty based
Robert Reyes
Totally, only fucking losers would want to see their species reach it's full potential.
Jack Perez
>"full potential"
What is that? Something you read in sci-fi?
Julian Jenkins
>also the idea of launching it from the north or south pole is pretty based
I suppose it wouldn't matter much, given the sheer amount of energy you'd be lifting with, but it'd be inefficient as fuck. Also hilarious effects in the polar magnetosphere where the lines are closest.
And I laughed at the "that's only a problem for one megaton or more" -- first, that's thinking of ground EMP, not the radiation belt that would cook the satellite constellation (which is the reason this shouldn't be done), and second, the effect up there is cumulative. It's not like one burst of charged particles is going to cancel out the next one. They add.
Ethan Williams
Inefficient isn't a factor in the orion. They had planned on bringing along barber chairs.
Ground EMP is why they want to launch at the poles. They would be in the radiation belt for maybe a few minutes, not enough time for a sufficient exposure.
> and second, the effect up there is cumulative. It's not like one burst of charged particles is going to cancel out the next one. They add. What is that supposed to mean? They don't make fallout.
Henry Perez
I'm starting to think that the only practical way to build this thing would be on a facility on the surface of the moon, which is by definition, rather impractical
However, it would be a lot less of a pain in the ass than lining up parts in space individually and it basically eliminates the radiation problem because its past the van allen belt
Dominic Hall
Space would be easier than dealing with the moondust.
Joseph Lee
Unfortunately he's right.. the radiation gets trapped in the earth's magnetic field
They only did one ionosphere test and it had some disturbing effects
Nah, from my evolutionary genetics professor. It's not common core, you wouldn't understand.
Jaxson Barnes
>They would be in the radiation belt for maybe a few minutes, not enough time for a sufficient exposure.
Read up on the Starfish project. Now multiply the number of cooked satellites by roughly 10,000.
Matthew Harris
Starfish prime was a very inefficient device. The shaped charges for orion would burn all their fissile materials.
Christian Lopez
Your professor doesn't get to make an objective purpose for humanity.
Nathaniel Green
wow strawmaning at the best . When did I ever say the EU. I meant ukraine...which borders eu countries and as such is concern for the eu's defence policy ...which...as I said (in a more of a joking way) was basically "nato help us" instead of the eu actually doing anything . I have not at any point said what u said ... you literally took what i said and added words on top of it
Easton James
There isn't really a practical way to build the thing, which is why nobody has tried. The threat to the satellite constellation undoes its main advantage, of lifting huge amounts of heavy shit off the surface easily.
Once you're in orbit, there are actually better propulsion methods than nuclear pulse -- but chemical rockets are tragically limited in payload
Friend, I appreciate your enthusiasm but you don't understand this subject at all.
Isaac Ward
I still wonder if the EMP amplifying effects that the Earth's magnetic field caused in Starfish Prime would be an issue even if the radiation wasn't
Ryan Brown
I'm just saying you're comparing a series of 1kt bombs with a 1.4mt bomb. They can just stop the burn when they pass through that area.
Ian Harris
maybe after Hillary rigs the election and starts WW3, once all the the satellites are destroyed, the survivors can build one lol
Camden Mitchell
should we really start fucking around with NUCLEAR EXPLOSIONS in space?
am i the only one who thinks it sounds insane?
Joshua Russell
well I mean it's like the safest place for nuclear explosions, once you get past the van allen belts
Connor Parker
He didn't. While the idea of a species' peak potential is a goal in itself, what that peak actually IS could be any number of things, terraforming, free space travel, mastery over life and genetics, mastery over ourselves as a civilization ect. We didn't get this far by sitting in huts and deciding to give up because we didn't like some other guys idea.
Gavin Parker
The radiation is the issue. Nukes expend a lot of their energy in X-Ray form, along with a whole fuckton of charged particles. Those get trapped in the Earth's magnetic field and create artificial radiation belts that last a very long time.
The satellites orbiting the Earth are not designed to survive in that environment, and they will get damaged, leading to havoc down below where we live. This is why we don't explode nukes in space.
>I'm just saying you're comparing a series of 1kt bombs with a 1.4mt bomb.
Yes, but the effect is cumulative. Instead of one big blast of radiation into the magnetosphere, we're talking about a whole bunch of smaller ones -- but the effect will be the same. Like filling a bucket with cups of water instead of dumping another bucket in. The charged particles have nowhere to go.
>They can just stop the burn when they pass through that area.
That's a good idea, but you have to compensate for the loss of momentum, either by exploding a whole lot more kilotonnage of fission in the atmosphere, which will be unpopular for various reasons, or trying to save some momentum with some chemical rockets. That's what I mentioned earlier.
John Hughes
>The radiation is the issue. Nukes expend a lot of their energy in X-Ray form, along with a whole fuckton of charged particles. Those get trapped in the Earth's magnetic field and create artificial radiation belts that last a very long time.
They're shaped charges. The energy only goes into the pusher plate, the rest of it is going much too fast to enter into any kind of orbital "belt".
>The satellites orbiting the Earth are not designed to survive in that environment, and they will get damaged, leading to havoc down below where we live. This is why we don't explode nukes in space.
There will be no effect on them. They are not in the path of the directed energy.
>Yes, but the effect is cumulative. Instead of one big blast of radiation into the magnetosphere, we're talking about a whole bunch of smaller ones -- but the effect will be the same. Like filling a bucket with cups of water instead of dumping another bucket in. The charged particles have nowhere to go.
They have escape velocity. They literally have everywhere to go,
>That's a good idea, but you have to compensate for the loss of momentum, either by exploding a whole lot more kilotonnage of fission in the atmosphere, which will be unpopular for various reasons, or trying to save some momentum with some chemical rockets. That's what I mentioned earlier.
I don't think you know how this works, but i appreciate your enthusiasm.
Joshua Diaz
Would it be possible to go into orbit around the moon for the build and launch?
Jonathan Cruz
>The energy only goes into the pusher plate, the rest of it is going much too fast to enter into any kind of orbital "belt".
Oh that. Modern satellites are far better than the ones we had in 1962, lol.
Samuel Nguyen
...
Daniel Russell
...
Nolan Ward
>Orion Enjoy spending $100 billion per mission just to make the nukes famalam
Ian Anderson
Space is filled with nothing. And the Sun produce way more radiation than what we can make. The only thing to worry would be to fuck up all the satellites.