"Saturn V" Rocket Launch / Image via NASA Coolest Vehicle Ever Made in America |
Sure chemical rockets are cool, a combustion engine turbine nozzle releasing millions of joules of energy within 600 seconds to propel millions of pounds of rocket & payload into outer space, but they can only carry as much fuel as the fuel tanks can hold & most of the rocket vehicle a giant fuel tank that can only be scaled so much.
Rocket Mass Ratios via NASA |
Space X falcon 9 for example, has an exterior shell about 1 mm thick which is thinner than the shell to body ratio for a common aluminum pop can. Rocket fuel tanks also have to hold pressurized cryogenic fluids without failures & most often made of a thin aluminum tank mandrel wrapped with epoxy soaked (prepreg) carbon fiber bundles in overlapping geometrically offset layers for added strength, by a figment winding robot, like the one Toyota Lex us used to make the carbon fiber dive-shaft in the LFA, see "Making of the LFA on Youtube"
I have watched a lots of rocket launches & rocket launch failures on YouTube (<-click) & have never been present at a really big rocket launch like the amazing Saturn V or Falcon 9 more recently. My dad & I started launching hobby rockets powered by solid rocket motors when I was a young child.
Link to Image Clipped YouTube Video |
Toy Rockets with Tiny Solid Rocket Motors (<- link to YouTube example)
Meg & I took our "Big Bertha" rock & some motors & an igniter wire system & fired it at 60 acres in Redmond for fun a few years ago, after my Dad died, to celebrate his life & some nostalgic memories. I tried finding this video on my YouTube channel to no avail // confident I made it using several cameras, probably on my old broken iMac 5K or its 4TB backup drive -- I have a new file management technique since my new iMac (last Intel Model) came with a tiny 256GB fast SSD -- not nearly big enough for larger files used in video editing, so I record with my iPhone clips, import then into iMovie, edit, export the 4K file, upload it to Youtube, then delete the local files off my phone & computer to conserve limited SSD data storage space. Small storage spaces locally remind me of small fuel tanks on rockets -- lol
Finite FuelTank Rockets
I assure you that the fuel mass paradox of rockets & their general lack of reusability or long life as a vehicle, think less like a firework & more like a Toyota Hi-Lux Pickup that runs for decades & millions of miles of heavy abuse. Old single use rockets were like a super car in terms of cost, that is driven once for a few hours & then destroyed & scraped. Not only finite, chemical fuels are a relative dead end because with 8 billion people we can deplete Earth of its feedstocks & at a rate that vastly eclipses the rates of formation of those resources in nature by natural processes that takes eons to slowly go forward with entropy reversing life development in the biosphere of Earth! Nuclear energy offers us a better energy platform for powerful deep space rockets that go much further than any chemical rocket.
Fission & Fusion Rockets
Nuclear fission & nuclear fusion powered rockets have much higher energy density than chemical rockets because nuclear energy makes use of atomic processes that are far more energetic than chemical reactions, both in terms of net total energy output but also in terms of energy density. Consider a common nuclear fuel bundle pellet of lightly enriched uranium dioxide. It contains more energy than an olympic swimming pool full of diesel fuel.
They stack these pellets into zirconium clad tubes, assembled into bundles that are then installed as arrays of bundles & control rods in the core of nuclear fission reactors, the core bundle mass & density used to create enough neutron density to sustain a nuclear fission chain reaction, which releases immense amounts of heat energy over many dozens of months, while less than 4% of the fuel energy actually converted to heat to boil water to turn turbine generators to make electricity.
This means spend nuclear fuel from common 2nd Gen. fission energy reactors, of which there are many hundreds operating daily around the world, still very energetic & can be burned up as new fuel in newer 4th Gen. IFR style reactors or similar with much better fuel economy, enhanced neutron economy, superlative walk away safety automatic operation & scalable designs from as small as a shipping container MMR like the nuclear reactors on aircraft carriers & submarines to larger SMR plants with several to tens of modular units designed to match local loads with scalable future development & added capacity by simply adding a few more units & connecting them up.
Even the Best Combustion Limited
Let me give you an example. Cryogenic liquid oxygen or LO2 & cryogenic liquid hydrogen or LH2 are one of the most potent chemical rocket fuel combinations & the combustion of hydrogen in oxygen produces only non-toxic water vapor as an emission, making this kind of rocket the cleanest burning of them all; similar to the concentrated hydrogen peroxide decomposition thruster that blows H202 past a silver mesh screen at high pressure where the silver Ag helps catalytically decompose the hydrogen peroxide into O2 & high temperature 740 C, high pressure steam.
The original Bell Rocket Belt could only fly for 21 seconds while consuming 5 gallons or 18 liters of concentrated hydrogen peroxide. Development of the pack at Bell Aerospace started as early as 1953 in the works of Wendell F. Moore. Human body a very unstable platform & the rocket motor setup in the Bell pack generates 280 pounds-forge or 1.25kN or 127kgf thrust. The pack weighed 125 lb or 57 kg. Moore had an accident that broke his kneecap in 1961, so Engineer Harold Graham took over development testing. On April 20th, 1961 the first 13 seconds long free flight near Niagara Falls airport reached 4 feet or 1.2 meter height & flew smoothly forward at 10km/h for a distance of 108 feet or ~35 m /
Simple Powerful Rockets
The famous 1960's rocket belt backpack rocket thruster system uses this 100% hydrogen peroxide pressure fed into a set of articulated silver catalyst rocket motors with a controllable throttle setup that enables the rider controller to vary the pitch of the thrust & rate of thrust why flying the jet pack. This system very low mass for its power output & only recently eclipsed by liquid ion battery electric ducted fan wearable helicopter & compact body worn turbine jet engines powered by kerosene or jet fuel or diesel.
Worm Hole Shortcut
Making use of an Einstein-Rosen bridge to warp across spacetime in a worm hold not only the subject of science fiction writers & SCI-FI movies, but also a physical real possibility for future space development. Even at the speed of light it would take a spacecraft 600,000 years to reach Andromeda by direct line of sight, so we need a faster way there & worm hole travel at faster than light travel speeds the only way to do so within the finite constraints of a natural human lifetime of the astronauts doing such a mission.
Quantum Entanglement Communication Needed
We need much more advanced technology as a human civilization to actually leverage worm holes in space to help space exploration missions go further faster in a bigger way & that leaves a communications cutoff issue such that it would be impractical to communicate with Earth from that craft unless quantum entanglement communication systems that perform spooky action at a distance are utilized via applied quantum physics technologies not invented, yet developed or commercialized in a big enough way, just outside a few early experiments with satellites in lower earth orbit communicating with ground stations with faster than light communication speeds by entangled q bits pair entangled on Earth, then one kept on Earth while the other flown to space aboard a rocket launched satellite into space, where if one toggled rapidly between 1 & 0 on earth, the same exact sequence observed on the one in space, without any obvious RF or Light or other physically explicable phenomenon connecting them.
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