Spaceports New / Potential Launch sites The Scottish National Party is calling for an RAF airbase in Moray to become the UK’s first commercial spaceport. The base has already been identified by Virgin Galactic as a possible location for a commercial space enterprise. Speaking earlier this month, Virgin Galactic president Will Whitehorn said that...
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Launch vehicles (Multi-stage)
While the lower stages of a multi-stage rocket vehicle are discarded before the machine leaves the atmosphere, the upper stages and the spacecraft they carry, if there is a distinction, need to operate in...
Project Prometheus – Nuclear Electric Engines
This project is a NASA / JPL attempt to develop a more heavily instrumented craft travelling farther from the Sun. The concept would need to power its ion thrusters with a nuclear fission reactor...
Project Orion – Nuclear Pulse Units (NPU)
While the US and the Soviet Union were beginning work on NTR systems, a group of American researchers also considered a more direct and dramatic way to use nuclear...
Solar Thermal Rocket (STR)
Ultimately, the unsolved problem of radioactive fallout killed ORION for good. Any ORION launch would have led to public protests, and the Atmospheric Test-Ban Treaty, signed in August 1963,...
Gas Core Nuclear Rocket (GCNR) Engines
Researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory have also considered another interesting NTR propulsion scheme, known as a “gas core nuclear rocket (GCNR)”. In a GCNR, hydrogen is pumped...