Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: combjelly who wrote (975189)	10/25/2016 6:45:28 PM
From: koan	Respond to of 1575191

Great ideas and the new liberal power may be able to effect ideas like that. <<Easy enough. Revive Project Orion. Convert the nuclear weapons to Pulsed Propulsion Units. Each launch uses 300 PPUs. Use Shuttle Reusable Boosters to loft each spaceship above the bulk of the air, say 200km. Since it is going to orbit, the craft would almost be on one side, so the nuclear material will be going faster than escape velocity and shoot into space. And go big, 100k tons or more per launch. So what would we launch? Everything we need for a few decades. Entire lunar colonies. Lunar mining equipment. Nuclear reactors, safed so they could be stored in orbit for long periods of time. Entire space stations for the Earth. The Moon. Mars. Project Timberwolf nuclear thermal rockets for the Earth-Moon circuit and Earth-Mars circuit tuned to run on lunar water. Storage stations for lunar water and lunar methane around Earth. Solar powered satellites. In short, everything we need for a couple of decades stored in orbit for later use. With a mine on the Moon for water and the tugs to move it to and from Earth orbit, all we need to do is get people from the surface to LEO. Once there, they can go anywhere in the Solar System. So giving up nukes could give us the Solar System pretty cheaply. Seems like a no-brainer.