Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The launch of such an Orion nuclear bomb rocket from the ground or low Earth orbit would generate an electromagnetic pulse that could cause significant damage to computers and satellites as well as flooding the van Allen belts with high-energy radiation. Since the EMP footprint would be a few hundred miles wide, this problem might be solved by ...
Project Orion was the first serious attempt to design a nuclear pulse rocket. A design was formed at General Atomics during the late 1950s and early 1960s, with the idea of reacting small directional nuclear explosives utilizing a variant of the Teller–Ulam two-stage bomb design against a large steel pusher plate attached to the spacecraft ...
In a dramatic sequence, the world's leading experts debate the benefits and drawbacks of various methods. Conventional rockets are too slow, and antimatter engines are too unstable; they eventually settle on nuclear pulse propulsion, as originally suggested by Project Orion. The world's engineers, scientists, and manufacturing workers begin ...
Nuclear power sources could also be used to provide the spacecraft with electrical power for operations and scientific instrumentation. [12] Examples: NERVA (Nuclear Energy for Rocket Vehicle Applications), a US nuclear thermal rocket program; Project Rover, an American project to develop a nuclear thermal rocket. The program ran at the Los ...
The Project Orion concept of propulsion by nuclear pulses has been proposed. The largest spacecraft design analyzed in Project Orion had a 400 m (1,300 ft) diameter and weighed approximately 8 million tons. It could be large enough to host a city of 100,000 or more people.
An early appearance of an Orion-style nuclear pulse propelled rocket in science fiction was in the science fiction novel Empire of the Atom written by A. E. van Vogt in 1956. In this novel there is a post-atomic-war interplanetary empire called the Empire of Lynn that uses Orion-type nuclear rockets for interplanetary spaceflight.
The ministry said Yars missile launcher crews in at least two different regions were set to move over 100 kilometres (62 miles) and practice camouflage and deployment.
Mini-Mag Orion (MMO), or Miniature Magnetic Orion, is a proposed type of spacecraft propulsion based on the Project Orion nuclear propulsion system. The Mini-Mag Orion system achieves propulsion by compressing fissile material in a magnetic field, a Z-pinch, until fission occurs. This fission reaction propels the craft.