this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2024
1369 points (98.5% liked)
People Twitter
5383 readers
1556 users here now
People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
RULES:
- Mark NSFW content.
- No doxxing people.
- Must be a tweet or similar
- No bullying or international politcs
- Be excellent to each other.
- Provide an archived link to the tweet (or similar) being shown if it's a major figure or a politician.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Oh and on FF drives, fhey're kind of messy and risk pollution if they fail near earth (though not nearly as much as other nuclear designs). It's fine for scientific missions, but becomes much more eyebrow raising en masse for a Mars colonization type effort.
IIRC the fissile material needs to be relatively high grade.
I don't know if I quite agree with that being a morale issue. But that same logic nuclear reactors are immoral because if they blow up they can cause a lot of harm.
I do agree that it is a little sketchy for human flight, but they wouldn't use it if there was a significant chance of it harming the people on board.
This is spaceflight. There is always a tremendous chance of harm to people on board, even with speculative nuclear technology to get the spacecraft a little less like thin paper bags.
I would highly recommend reading up on Project Rho, on somewhat feasable near term technologies if we can just figure out the engineering: https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/
They're awesome, and I hope they get funded. But it will also dispell any illusuion you have of spaceflight being remotely practical on a large scale.