Spacecraft drive propulsion types and descriptions
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 and a system for converting the reactor’s heat to electricity. This could give the craft more than 100 times more...
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 power to propel a spaceship: detonate small atomic bombs behind it. The ORION project, as it was named, seems to have originated with Dr. Theodore...
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, basically made an ORION launch illegal. ORION was finally canned for good in December 1965. It remains an interesting footnote to a time when people...
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 into one end of a cylindrical reaction chamber, with an exhaust at the other end. The hydrogen expands as it passes through the chamber, and...
Although hybrids have been in development over the last 50 years, they have not made it into mainstream commercial applications because they did not produce as much thrust as liquid and solid systems. “Hybrid rockets tend to be sort of anaemic in their ability to produce thrust,” Cantwell said. This is because the fuel burns too slowly,...
The major weakness of the solid-fuel rocket is the fact that, once lit, it burns to completion, and the only thing that can be done is to divert the thrust when it is no longer needed. The lack of burn control for solid-fuel rockets has led to the development of “hybrid” rockets that use a solid-fuel...
The idea of using atomic power as the basis for a rocket engine pre-dates the First World War, but at that time neither liquid rocket engines nor atomic power were realities, and these concepts were essentially speculations about speculations. However, by the end of World War II, both large liquid-fuel rocket engines and atomic...
Paraffin was previously thought to be weak, easily broken and unsuitable for use as rocket fuel. But Cantwell’s team found that it is quite strong — at least twice as strong as conventional solid propellants. The paraffin they use as rocket fuel is the same material used as hurricane candles and sculptor’s wax. “Paraffin” is a...
While an inertial confinement fusion (ICF) would use lasers or particle beams to achieve fusion, a magnetic confinement fusion (MCF) might achieve fusion by confining plasma with strong magnetic fields. This should be possible, since the fusion plasma is composed primarily of ions and electrons that are susceptible to magnetic forces. The fusion plasma...
The success of Spaceship One could increase general interest in hybrid engines, especially for eventual use in space where the hydrazine is currently the prime propellant. Hydrazine is highly toxic, explosive, and the logistics of loading a spacecraft with the fuel are difficult. Therefore, hybrid fuels could be a viable alternative. SpaceDev has already begun an in-space effort...