Mars site may hold 'buried life'

[Sarevok]

Have you met anyone working for DRDO ? Do you personally know any Congress or BJP leaders ? Can you manipulate the Lok Shova (Indian parlament) ? Do you have men like Abu J Kalam spouting your praise ? Is the Indian media in your pocket ? You have no idea about how India works yet you think you can barge in with an insane proposal.

Bill Gates is loved in India. He also has signficant tangential influence with power brokers in the country. But even he could not convince them to support what you are proposing.

[Sarevok]

By the way you have not mentioned how much each of your nucleae pulse units cost.

And how many are needed to push a six thousand ton spacecraft into space.


If you cant even convince geeks on the internet who live and breath engineering mathematics you have no chance with silly Indian beaurocrats who have no interest in science.

[LionElJonson]

By the way you have not mentioned how much each of your nucleae pulse units cost.

And how many are needed to push a six thousand ton spacecraft into space.


If you cant even convince geeks on the internet who live and breath engineering mathematics you have no chance with silly Indian beaurocrats who have no interest in science.

Truthfully, I have a multi-stage plan. First, I finish reading the publically available materials. Second, I get my aviation professor to help me with my pitches; he's the head of the local Chamber of Commerce, so he'd probably be able to tell me how to improve them (and his personality is such that he's likely to do so, though he's fairly busy so I may have to schedule a time to meet with him regarding that). I'd also ask him if he'd be willing to tell me how to calculate the economic benefit a facility will grant to a local economy; he apparently learned how to do so while in the USAF. Then, I begin looking for investors in my local area, and use that early investment capital to hire a few engineers to make all the calculations and whatnot for how much the design would actually cost, how much it'd cost to launch, et cetera. Then, with that done, I begin applying for approval from the assorted bureaucratic organizations, looking for more grants and investors to begin designing the nut-and-bolts nitty-gritty parts of the design, et cetera. If at some point my business starts running out of money, we put the design on the backburners while we do engineering consultancy work to generate income to keep afloat.

Also, I'll point out that unlike most people, I have no fear of public speaking, so once I work out my pitch, I'll probably be quite capable of delivering it. It's not something that'd come across on an Internet message board, though.

[Aaron]

And what do you intend to tell Pakistan? "Don't worry about the thousands of nukes we're churning out over here. There totally for this awesome spaceship we're building!"

[Shroom Man 777]

Pakistan can be the launch site.

If you cant even convince geeks on the internet who live and breath engineering mathematics you have no chance with silly Indian beaurocrats who have no interest in science.

I think their lack of interest in science will help his chances, not hamper them.

(It will never happen though.)

[LionElJonson]

And what do you intend to tell Pakistan? "Don't worry about the thousands of nukes we're churning out over here. There totally for this awesome spaceship we're building!"

"Don't worry; India's got plenty of nukes already, each of which is hundreds of times more powerful than the pulse units my rockets use. If they wanted to launch a nuclear attack, the ability for my rockets to add to that would be negligible, and there are fail-safes to prevent detonation unless they're being used properly as spacecraft propulsion. I'll take care to make sure none of my flights go over your territory, though."

[Aaron]

If you think that either Pakistan or China will believe that, well I have some water front property to sell you.

[PeZook]

"Don't worry; India's got plenty of nukes already, each of which is hundreds of times more powerful than the pulse units my rockets use. If they wanted to launch a nuclear attack, the ability for my rockets to add to that would be negligible, and there are fail-safes to prevent detonation unless they're being used properly as spacecraft propulsion. I'll take care to make sure none of my flights go over your territory, though."

Yeah, sure. Failsafes preventing detonation

Because it would be totally impossible to convert those nukes into proper weapons, right? And then arm every Indian platoon with a launcher.

Not that India can build nukes that small ; Neither can the US (anymore). You're talking billions of dollars in investment just to gain that capability, and risk the US (and Russia, for that matter) saying "Well, no"

All of this ignoring the fact nobody is currently interested in a 6000 tonne launch vehicle. Indian can't support a colonization program, and the US won't. Using an Orion as a commercial satellite launcher is completely retarded.

[Commander 598]

Uh...Sea Dragon as envisioned would've a payload of 550 tonnes to LEO, and I doubt the estimate would be possible to reach in reality. Of course, that still translates to things like ~80 tonnes on lunar surface, which would've easily been enough to build a pretty bitchin' base.

Sea Dragon design may be enormous but the shipyard involved in the program did confirm they could build it. Now it is possible Sea Dragon would have just exploded due to being made of crude and cheap materials. But the point is conventional rockets can be made lot larger, You do not require Orion to lift enormous payloads. Conventional rockets are not obsolete.

Take Sea Dragon...and make it BIGGER. We'll call it Jormungandr...it's first project will be to launch something that circles the world...

[Simon_Jester]

Not yet, no. I'm going to do that once I've finished getting all my ducks in a row, so to speak, and I've thoroughly read everything I can find on the subject. To pester them before I've done so would be unprofessional.

Since I have no reason to wish you harm, I hope you contact some actual Indian officials before you spend a ton of money on this idea.

Because be honest, you know damn well that there's a good chance the Indian government will say "oh, hell no, no we are NOT letting nuclear bombs out of our sight."

I mean, even ignoring the fact that those are really ridiculously small bombs, which are hard to build, and even ignoring engineering questions with the 6000-ton Orion design... that's a really serious obstacle.

[Sarevok]

You still have not showed

1) cost estimate per nuke
2) number of nukes required.

You dont have numbers to prove if your plan is cheaper per kilo than rocketry. Without knowing this why would you commit ?

[PeZook]

You still have not showed

1) cost estimate per nuke
2) number of nukes required.

You dont have numbers to prove if your plan is cheaper per kilo than rocketry. Without knowing this why would you commit ?

He did quote a number of 800 sub-kiloton devices for 6000 tonnes to LEO. I'm not sure how feasible it is, but it's not like it matters, since no country in the world has the ability to produce 800 sub-kiloton devices without some major R&D and infrastructural investment.

[Shroom Man 777]

Are not Davy Crockett-type tiny nukes actually much more difficult to construct then normal multikiloton nukes? Besides, the sheer number of those devices would outnumber the total amount of nukes in the possession of the Indian military forces. Oh man, LionElJohnson, are you in truth an evil villain overlord trying to take control of the Earth? Or, at least, India or something? To paraphrase that terrorist from Iron Man: Orion rockets, a man with a dozen of these could rule all Asia!

'Cause, man, I'd totally want in.

BTW, it would make for an awesome story wherein through some occurrence, the world swears off nuclear weapons and commits all the nukes in the world to the care of some space agency, for usage in Orion vehicles for space colonization! But then, this space agency is revealed to be under the control of a madman like LionElJohnson, and with his own personal nuclear arsenal generously donated by the world's governments, he now threatens the utopian unified Earth nations with destruction unless they surrender to his wills and give him one... MILLION dollars! With which he will rule the world!

[Sarevok]

Well 800 nuclear devices with a 1/3 kiloton yield do seem to produce three times the energy a 6000 ton object at 11200 m/s has. Of course that is not the problem. If 800 nukes dont do the job you thrown in 8000. Sufficient amount of nuclear energy can do anything. The question is cost. Anyone know how much micro nukes with sub kiloton yields cost ? Ignoring the immense develop effort I would like to knoe just the nuclear pulse unit cost in dollars for an orion launch.

[Sarevok]

Are not Davy Crockett-type tiny nukes actually much more difficult to construct then normal multikiloton nukes? Besides, the sheer number of those devices would outnumber the total amount of nukes in the possession of the Indian military forces. Oh man, LionElJohnson, are you in truth an evil villain overlord trying to take control of the Earth? Or, at least, India or something? To paraphrase that terrorist from Iron Man: Orion rockets, a man with a dozen of these could rule all Asia!

'Cause, man, I'd totally want in.

BTW, it would make for an awesome story wherein through some occurrence, the world swears off nuclear weapons and commits all the nukes in the world to the care of some space agency, for usage in Orion vehicles for space colonization! But then, this space agency is revealed to be under the control of a madman like LionElJohnson, and with his own personal nuclear arsenal generously donated by the world's governments, he now threatens the utopian unified Earth nations with destruction unless they surrender to his wills and give him one... MILLION dollars! With which he will rule the world!

Well assuming unlimited funding an Orion vessel launch would be most fearsome and awe inspiring thing to watch. It would look like a man made sun journeying towards the stars.

[PeZook]

I'm sure Shep will know

[Sarevok]

I think an Orion vessel would be the ultimate supervillain escape plan. You can take enought stuff with you to setup base on an asteroid or small Jovian moon and fuck up planet Earth as you bid goodbye.

[Shroom Man 777]

Propelling your escape vehicle by self-destructing your evil lair with a nuke to launch yourself into space. Yep, that'd rank somewhere up there.

I think LionElJohnson's real name is Hank Scorpio.

[Sea Skimmer]

Are not Davy Crockett-type tiny nukes actually much more difficult to construct then normal multikiloton nukes?

That they are, but Indian can almost surely do it if it tired. Keep in mind Davy Crockett was low yield, but not physically small so it could still use normal implosion. Devices which are low yield and physically small like 155mm atomic field artillery projectiles are way harder to design and build in turn.

Any low yield device wastes fissile material, which will always make them extremely expensive. The fun thing is the original designers of Orion damn well knew this, which is why many Orion studies were huge, like a quarter million tons kind of huge. The number of nukes required would be the same, and higher yields could be accomplished by fully utilizing the fissile material needed anyway for micro nukes. Additional yield would come from thermonuclear or boosted fission device designs, which involves adding fusion fuels like Deuterium and or Titrium which are not so demanding to produce as Pu-239 or U-235.

Course the fallout gets worse the bigger you go, but micro nukes low efficiency already makes them very dirty anyway. Particularly when you initiate 800 of them closely together causing the fallout patterns to overlay. So if you are going to do this, one could easily argue that the only rational way to do it would be with a super massive ship. At least with a quarter million ton design we really could orbit something truly massive, maybe a complete orbital metal works that could turn moon rocks into rocket casings. A mere 6,000 ton Orion is accomplishing nothing we can't easily do with one of the Nova series designs, seeings how Sea Dragon was already mentioned. The Nova studies got fairly massive, but always stuck with a fairly simple known staged layout and cheap fuels like LOX and kerosene. Nothing radically new required, just scale.
http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/nova.htm

Besides, the sheer number of those devices would outnumber the total amount of nukes in the possession of the Indian military forces

By a factor of 10-20 no less. Frankly even with the US fissile stockpile though, you would start getting worried making multiple Orion launches.

[LionElJonson]

"Don't worry; India's got plenty of nukes already, each of which is hundreds of times more powerful than the pulse units my rockets use. If they wanted to launch a nuclear attack, the ability for my rockets to add to that would be negligible, and there are fail-safes to prevent detonation unless they're being used properly as spacecraft propulsion. I'll take care to make sure none of my flights go over your territory, though."

Yeah, sure. Failsafes preventing detonation

Because it would be totally impossible to convert those nukes into proper weapons, right? And then arm every Indian platoon with a launcher.

Do it right, and it probably would be (or at least, it'd be less expensive to simply build an entirely new batch of nukes for them). Off the top of my head, building the pulse units with tamper-proof firing mechanisms, and then encrypting each one's arming code with a unique one-time pad, and then encrypting the other half of that pad with the public key of the NPP drive's arming mechanism, so only it is capable of using its private key to decrypt the one-time pad, and then using that to send an encrypted arming code that the pulse unit would recognize. One-time pads are impossible to decrypt so long as they're only used once, and if you use a big enough key for the public-private key, it'd take years or decades to crack it.

Maybe go an extra mile and encode the other half of the one-time pads onto tamper-proof USB sticks that are stored in locked, armored briefcases which are in turn stored in an armored vault, except when transported to the launch site, whereupon they are handcuffed to the person transporting them (who is at all times escorted by multiple armed security personnel during the transport procedure) while still inside the vault.

Shroom Man: I'm no supervillain; I've got a few goals, some of which are idealistic, some of which are down-to-earth. Firstly, I just want to build a business and make a lot of money by becoming the Boeing. Secondly, the stars belong to humanity, and with commercially-built NPP spacecraft, I can give them that which has been denied to them for far too long. Thirdly, accumulating wealth will give me a good position to benefit once the Singularity rolls around; I'd like to become an immortal robot god, but even a distributed hivemind with multiple custom-grown bodies would be nice.

[PeZook]

Do it right, and it probably would be (or at least, it'd be less expensive to simply build an entirely new batch of nukes for them). Off the top of my head, building the pulse units with tamper-proof firing mechanisms, and then encrypting each one's arming code with a unique one-time pad, and then encrypting the other half of that pad with the public key of the NPP drive's arming mechanism, so only it is capable of using its private key to decrypt the one-time pad, and then using that to send an encrypted arming code that the pulse unit would recognize. One-time pads are impossible to decrypt so long as they're only used once, and if you use a big enough key for the public-private key, it'd take years or decades to crack it.

And all it would take to defeat this mechanism would be to remove the computer controlling the firing and replace it with a simpler detonator. Since, you know, India is in full control of the warheads? You can't integrate the encryption shenanigans into the firing mechanism itself ; You can make it more difficult to replace the fuses, but here's a thought: the most expensive parts of a nuclear weapon are the explosives, neutron reflectors, high-precision detonators and the fissile material itself. In fact, the fissile material is so expensive it's routinely resused between warhead designs. It is economical to disassemble a warhead and build a new one around the core, instead of making the devices and fissile from scratch. The US did it all the time.

Here's a rough estimate of the fissile costs of a pulse unit: Plutonium costs about 4000$ per gram ; It's hard to find the lowest critical mass of plutonium, since that's classified data, but the Fat Man (the nuke that wiped out Nagasaki) used 6.2 kilograms. Let's assume today's bombs manage to reduce it by two orders of magnitude ; That's 0.062 kilograms, or 248 000 $ per pulse unit in fissile costs alone.

You quoted 800 bombs ; That's 49.6 kilograms of plutonium, or 198,4 million in fissile costs per launch. Which is actually a damn attractive proposition since it equals about 33 dollars per kilogram to LEO, but this figure does not include the ship itself (which, by the way, would be non-reuseable), R&D, launch facilities, personnel and cost of the production facilities necessary to make that 49.6 kilos of plutonium launch after launch, which India doesn't have right now. I probably severely underestimated the fissile mass required, anyway.

So...how much will the R&D and construction on the ship itself set everybody back? Remember you will have to fork all of it over even if you by some miracle don't get blocked by India itself, Russia or the US.

Shroom Man: I'm no supervillain; I've got a few goals, some of which are idealistic, some of which are down-to-earth. Firstly, I just want to build a business and make a lot of money by becoming the Boeing. Secondly, the stars belong to humanity, and with commercially-built NPP spacecraft, I can give them that which has been denied to them for far too long. Thirdly, accumulating wealth will give me a good position to benefit once the Singularity rolls around; I'd like to become an immortal robot god, but even a distributed hivemind with multiple custom-grown bodies would be nice.

I really think you should start with no.1 (dislodging Boeing from the market is a lifetime goal in and of itself), and then, when you have piles of money, influence and power, start thinking about pie-in-the-sky projects like selling Orion spacecraft. Because you're gonna need every single ounce of that influence to make it happen.

[LionElJonson]

Do it right, and it probably would be (or at least, it'd be less expensive to simply build an entirely new batch of nukes for them). Off the top of my head, building the pulse units with tamper-proof firing mechanisms, and then encrypting each one's arming code with a unique one-time pad, and then encrypting the other half of that pad with the public key of the NPP drive's arming mechanism, so only it is capable of using its private key to decrypt the one-time pad, and then using that to send an encrypted arming code that the pulse unit would recognize. One-time pads are impossible to decrypt so long as they're only used once, and if you use a big enough key for the public-private key, it'd take years or decades to crack it.

And all it would take to defeat this mechanism would be to remove the computer controlling the firing and replace it with a simpler detonator. Since, you know, India is in full control of the warheads? You can't integrate the encryption shenanigans into the firing mechanism itself ; You can make it more difficult to replace the fuses, but here's a thought: the most expensive parts of a nuclear weapon are the explosives, neutron reflectors, high-precision detonators and the fissile material itself. In fact, the fissile material is so expensive it's routinely resused between warhead designs. It is economical to disassemble a warhead and build a new one around the core, instead of making the devices and fissile from scratch. The US did it all the time.

Here's a rough estimate of the fissile costs of a pulse unit: Plutonium costs about 4000$ per gram ; It's hard to find the lowest critical mass of plutonium, since that's classified data, but the Fat Man (the nuke that wiped out Nagasaki) used 6.2 kilograms. Let's assume today's bombs manage to reduce it by two orders of magnitude ; That's 0.062 kilograms, or 248 000 $ per pulse unit in fissile costs alone.

You quoted 800 bombs ; That's 49.6 kilograms of plutonium, or 198,4 million in fissile costs per launch. Which is actually a damn attractive proposition since it equals about 33 dollars per kilogram to LEO, but this figure does not include the ship itself (which, by the way, would be non-reuseable), R&D, launch facilities, personnel and cost of the production facilities necessary to make that 49.6 kilos of plutonium launch after launch, which India doesn't have right now. I probably severely underestimated the fissile mass required, anyway.

The Nasa paper I found quoted a price tag of about that much ($60 per pound), for a 20 meter pusher plate design. Of course, that was in the 1960s, I suppose, so I might need to take inflation into account. Doing a google search, I found this, which says it'd be about $410/lb, though who knows how inflation affected the price of nuclear materials; I doubt it was the same as that of a loaf of bread. Wolfram Alpha says the prices of Uranium steeply dropped over the last couple years, which I assume was probably related to the bottom falling out of the stock market in general. I'm not sure how much uranium that $40 buys, though.

So...how much will the R&D and construction on the ship itself set everybody back? Remember you will have to fork all of it over even if you by some miracle don't get blocked by India itself, Russia or the US.

Not sure. Probably a lot less than the Orion papers suggest, since with the advanced engineering software now available, we would be able to go directly from the drawing board to production, without highly expensive prototypes.

Shroom Man: I'm no supervillain; I've got a few goals, some of which are idealistic, some of which are down-to-earth. Firstly, I just want to build a business and make a lot of money by becoming the Boeing. Secondly, the stars belong to humanity, and with commercially-built NPP spacecraft, I can give them that which has been denied to them for far too long. Thirdly, accumulating wealth will give me a good position to benefit once the Singularity rolls around; I'd like to become an immortal robot god, but even a distributed hivemind with multiple custom-grown bodies would be nice.

I really think you should start with no.1 (dislodging Boeing from the market is a lifetime goal in and of itself), and then, when you have piles of money, influence and power, start thinking about pie-in-the-sky projects like selling Orion spacecraft. Because you're gonna need every single ounce of that influence to make it happen.

I'm not going to dislodge Boeing from the aircraft market; my goal is to become the Boeing of the spacecraft market, through the use of the revolutionary advantages afforded by nuclear pulse propulsion.

[PeZook]

The Nasa paper I found quoted a price tag of about that much ($60 per pound), for a 20 meter pusher plate design. Of course, that was in the 1960s, I suppose, so I might need to take inflation into account. Doing a google search, I found this, which says it'd be about $410/lb, though who knows how inflation affected the price of nuclear materials; I doubt it was the same as that of a loaf of bread. Wolfram Alpha says the prices of Uranium steeply dropped over the last couple years, which I assume was probably related to the bottom falling out of the stock market in general. I'm not sure how much uranium that $40 buys, though.

If you want to use linear implosion devices, you need more fissile overall, and the nukes are quite dirty. The upside is, of course, that you don't need to build reactors just to produce plutonium, and they can be smaller...

Like, say, small enough to fit into artillery shells. Bound to make Pakistan happy

Not sure. Probably a lot less than the Orion papers suggest, since with the advanced engineering software now available, we would be able to go directly from the drawing board to production, without highly expensive prototypes.

I'm not an engineer, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't work that way for radical new inventions that were never ever tried before even as a proof of concept. Especially radical new inventions of that scale (6000 tonne glider design? )

I really think you should start with no.1 (dislodging Boeing from the market is a lifetime goal in and of itself), and then, when you have piles of money, influence and power, start thinking about pie-in-the-sky projects like selling Orion spacecraft. Because you're gonna need every single ounce of that influence to make it happen.

I'm not going to dislodge Boeing from the aircraft market; my goal is to become the Boeing of the spacecraft market, through the use of the revolutionary advantages afforded by nuclear pulse propulsion.

Seeing as you'd need tremendous amounts of capital and influence to sell the idea, do the necessary R&D and build up the needed infrastructure, I don't see how you'll be able to accomplish that goal as a startup. Especially when you'd be, in fact, directly competing with Boeing who'd be able to throw their considerale weight around if they ever see you as an actual threat. So, yeah, you would need to dislodge Boeing and their highly succesful rocket division from the market.

Then we run into problems of marketing and sales...no commercial company will trust you with a satellite unless you can prove the radical, new ship riding nuclear explosions can survive the journey ; And you'd need to convince an awful lot of people in order to fill up that 6000 tonne payload space. In fact, there aren't enough commercial satellites launched annually to fill that up even partially, and talk about putting all your eggs in one gigantic basket...so, at least one succesful test flight would be required. Test flights have a disturbing tendency to go wrong all the time. You don't want to go wrong while launching a 6000 tonne glider loaded with 800 nuclear bombs.

And what happens once you hop through all these obstacles with the power of your manliness? You've got 6000 tonnes of satellites that need distributing to their proper orbits, which vary wildly. The 2010 launch schedule includes all sorts of missions from geostationary, through polar orbits all the way to an interplanetary probe. So...what are you going to use to move that 10 tonne object and change its inclination by 45 degrees or more?

Have you thought about the likely money-piling mission profile for your starship? Especially when the Orion would essentially be a giant one-use capsule?

I wish you the best of luck, really, but it does seem you need a more realistic plan.

[Sea Skimmer]

The Nasa paper I found quoted a price tag of about that much ($60 per pound), for a 20 meter pusher plate design. Of course, that was in the 1960s, I suppose, so I might need to take inflation into account. Doing a google search, I found this, which says it'd be about $410/lb, though who knows how inflation affected the price of nuclear materials; I doubt it was the same as that of a loaf of bread.

Yeah, it’s probably WAY higher then inflation because energy costs have gone up more then inflation, and safety standards have become higher then those imposed on production plants in the 1950s and 60s when the majority of the worlds HEU was produced. Most western fissile material production plants were forced to shutdown because of safety concerns, and that was decades ago. HEU is only produced by government facilities for government use; no open market for it exists. India has a very limited production capacity at best.

Of course, Russia actually has a major surplus of HEU right now, but no fucking way in hell would they sell it to anyone but the US, which is buying it only to blend it down to destroy it under a series of proliferation risk reduction pacts. This is entirely opposed to your goals.

Wolfram Alpha says the prices of Uranium steeply dropped over the last couple years, which I assume was probably related to the bottom falling out of the stock market in general. I'm not sure how much uranium that $40 buys, though.

Uranium prices are normally cited per pound of U3O8, which is a form of yellow cake. This is very raw form of uranium, basically a concentrated ore, the first stage of processing. It is not uranium metal. To make nuclear weapons material you must convert it to uranium metal, then enrich the metal to become HEU. That process is very expensive, time consuming and greatly reduces the mass of material you have to work with. Natural uranium is only about .7% U-235, though rare high grade ores can be in the range of 1-2%. In comparison weapons grade material is more like 90% U-235. Civilian nuclear fuel is less then 5% enrichment level. The main cost is the production plant and energy to do that enrichment, not the cost of the uranium feed stock.

Considering you don’t seem to know any of this, how are you expecting anyone to think you even have even a major casual interest in Orion drives? You just seem to wave your hands and declare that technology will solve anything. Technology could, but certainly not with someone so ignorant at the helm, and the real problem remains as ever money and politics.

Not sure. Probably a lot less than the Orion papers suggest, since with the advanced engineering software now available, we would be able to go directly from the drawing board to production, without highly expensive prototypes.

Yeah right. You can use software, at risk, to bypass prototypes for known types of structures. The shock absorbers required for an Orion are nothing like anything else ever built. In other words the results of the software are not going to be validated by experience, which means lots of guesswork. That means you need prototypes. You might notice that when Boeing introduced new technology for building the 787 out of 50% composites they did in fact have to extensively prototype the plane, and the first production models still don't meet requirements and will be gimped for performance for life. That's despite hoards of software, and the plane still being a more or less known concept. Of course I can cite a couple projects of a more traditional nature which become near disasters because of over reliance on design software too. Like say LPD-17 and the A380 as recent ones.

I'm not going to dislodge Boeing from the aircraft market; my goal is to become the Boeing of the spacecraft market, through the use of the revolutionary advantages afforded by nuclear pulse propulsion.

Okay, Ill play along. Question number one is what's the political plan for reversing the Indian ratification of the Limited Test Ban Treaty without causing unacceptable international sanctions ? Nothing else matter until you get past this.

[LionElJonson]

The Nasa paper I found quoted a price tag of about that much ($60 per pound), for a 20 meter pusher plate design. Of course, that was in the 1960s, I suppose, so I might need to take inflation into account. Doing a google search, I found this, which says it'd be about $410/lb, though who knows how inflation affected the price of nuclear materials; I doubt it was the same as that of a loaf of bread.

Yeah, it’s probably WAY higher then inflation because energy costs have gone up more then inflation, and safety standards have become higher then those imposed on production plants in the 1950s and 60s when the majority of the worlds HEU was produced. Most western fissile material production plants were forced to shutdown because of safety concerns, and that was decades ago. HEU is only produced by government facilities for government use; no open market for it exists. India has a very limited production capacity at best.

Of course, Russia actually has a major surplus of HEU right now, but no fucking way in hell would they sell it to anyone but the US, which is buying it only to blend it down to destroy it under a series of proliferation risk reduction pacts. This is entirely opposed to your goals.

Really? Hmm. If that's the case, then my first impression of "It might be cheaper to just subcontract the production of nuclear fuel to a subcontractor and/or just build a breeder reactor than to buy the stuff on the open market" might well be the case. That said, I might well be able to convince Russia and the US to it, since India's already got nuclear weapons, and using them as NPP fuel is just as good as any way to dispose of the stuff peacefully.

Wolfram Alpha says the prices of Uranium steeply dropped over the last couple years, which I assume was probably related to the bottom falling out of the stock market in general. I'm not sure how much uranium that $40 buys, though.

Uranium prices are normally cited per pound of U3O8, which is a form of yellow cake. This is very raw form of uranium, basically a concentrated ore, the first stage of processing. It is not uranium metal. To make nuclear weapons material you must convert it to uranium metal, then enrich the metal to become HEU. That process is very expensive, time consuming and greatly reduces the mass of material you have to work with. Natural uranium is only about .7% U-235, though rare high grade ores can be in the range of 1-2%. In comparison weapons grade material is more like 90% U-235. Civilian nuclear fuel is less then 5% enrichment level. The main cost is the production plant and energy to do that enrichment, not the cost of the uranium feed stock.

Considering you don’t seem to know any of this, how are you expecting anyone to think you even have even a major casual interest in Orion drives? You just seem to wave your hands and declare that technology will solve anything. Technology could, but certainly not with someone so ignorant at the helm, and the real problem remains as ever money and politics.

Because I would do the research before making a serious proposal. Also, because I'm not just beating my head against the wall, here; I'm learning valuable stuff from this argument, and I thank you for that.

Not sure. Probably a lot less than the Orion papers suggest, since with the advanced engineering software now available, we would be able to go directly from the drawing board to production, without highly expensive prototypes.

Yeah right. You can use software, at risk, to bypass prototypes for known types of structures. The shock absorbers required for an Orion are nothing like anything else ever built. In other words the results of the software are not going to be validated by experience, which means lots of guesswork. That means you need prototypes. You might notice that when Boeing introduced new technology for building the 787 out of 50% composites they did in fact have to extensively prototype the plane, and the first production models still don't meet requirements and will be gimped for performance for life. That's despite hoards of software, and the plane still being a more or less known concept. Of course I can cite a couple projects of a more traditional nature which become near disasters because of over reliance on design software too. Like say LPD-17 and the A380 as recent ones.

Hmm. That might be a possible result of the aviation industry's caution; it's a bureaucratic nightmare trying to get anything that hasn't been extensively tested approved. I suppose I could probably save money there by making sure my engineers design the thing out of mostly pre-approved components, though.

I'm not going to dislodge Boeing from the aircraft market; my goal is to become the Boeing of the spacecraft market, through the use of the revolutionary advantages afforded by nuclear pulse propulsion.

Okay, Ill play along. Question number one is what's the political plan for reversing the Indian ratification of the Limited Test Ban Treaty without causing unacceptable international sanctions ? Nothing else matter until you get past this.

I don't need to; only the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty bans the civilian use of nuclear detonations. It's also why we aren't building prototypes; the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty bans them.