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Space Colonization

At the beginning of this week, I happened upon a link to this site about building rockets, Delta V discussions, designs, and many other things. Good and interesting stuff. This site is also full of links to other things including a concept about having permanently eliptical orbiting craft that swings inward to earth and outward to mars or the asteroids to facilitate transfer of people ( or possibly even materials ), and that link is here

Today, I saw a plan for Mars travel outlined by Buzz Aldrin using this same technique. Its listed here in a Popular Mechanics article.

We really need to build a whole infrastructure for the long term, and these articles show that (I still think I was born 50 years too soon).

This entry was posted on January 5th, 2006 at 06:26:03 pm and is filed under Space, Science. Tags: space

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1 comment

Comment from: Justin [Visitor] · http://ssc.justinfeng.com/
The atomic rockets site is pretty interesting, but the exhaust velocity of 35,000 m/s cited for polaris' Gas Core rocket is low compared to fusion propulsion, which can achieve velocities of 1,000,000 m/s (Isp: 10^5 s).

Gas Core fission rockets would pretty much use similar magnetic confinement technology as a fusion rocket (as they would both be plasmas), but due to the lower neutron radiation output from fusion reactions like D-3He, a fusion rocket would require less shielding, making it easier to achieve a given delta V. It might be a little easier to confine a fission plasma in a magnetic field, as you do not need to maintain the temperatures needed for fusion, but the high energy exhaust products from a fission rocket would be much harder to control. Also, the lower temperature automatically translates into lower performance.
01/05/06 @ 19:20

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