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From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: Nuclear powered rocket
Message-ID: <1991Apr19.070810.13753@amd.com>
Date: 18 Apr 91 17:57:44 GMT
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From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu


>From: rcg@lpi.liant.com (Rick Gorton)
>>I remember some program back in the 50s-60s era of a nuclear rocket engine that
>>left radioactive material all over the atmosphere...
>The name of the project was Project Pluto...
>	[Hmm, sounds like Project Orion.  You're better off
>	 asking in sci.space anyway. --CDR]

Actually this confuses two separate projects, and asking about Project Pluto
in sci.space might be unproductive.

Project Orion was a (large!) rocket propelled by nuclear bombs.  Fallout
from an Orion launch would have been comparable to a single atmospheric
hydrogen bomb test, and it would have launched several thousand tons of
payload into orbit.  Despite some attempts to get funding out of the
military, Orion was basically a civilian space project.

Project Pluto was an intercontinental cruise missile powered by a nuclear
ramjet, with a cruising speed of Mach 3 at sea level and an essentially
infinite range.  This is what the Air&Space article was about.  Pluto was
undertaken more or less as a backup project when ICBMs still looked iffy.
The extremely high speed would have made it fiercely difficult to intercept.
Design work got as far as a test firing of an experimental (not flight
ready) engine, which worked.  The success of the ICBM projects removed much
of the need for Pluto, and certain practical problems started to get more
attention:  it was decidedly unstealthy, the need to fly it over friendly
territory to reach the Soviet Union was troublesome because its radiation
(an unshielded gigawatt reactor) and shock wave were lethal to anything
near its path, and the final nail in its coffin was the impossibility of
testing it safely.

-- 
And the bean-counter replied,           | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
"beans are more important".             |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry