Opening
the Next Frontier
by Anthony Tate
Part 10: Prometheus would be proud of us.
In this section I describe a huge nuclear powered rocket launcher.
I will repeat and expand upon many of the points I made above, because
I don't want to throw cryptic acronyms around. I want people to
understand just how powerful we can make this rocket if we decide
to do it.
The effective use of nuclear power in space transportation allows
a paradigm shift in our thinking. All boosters which have been built
to date have been shackled by the low efficiency of chemical fuels.
Using chemicals it is possible to get off earth, but only barely.
Every gram of structure must be trimmed, exotic materials and cutting-edge
techniques are a necessity, and safety margins must be as slim as
we dare if success is to be achieved.
Nuclear power changes all that. Nuclear is VASTLY more energetic
than chemical. We no longer must guard every gram of mass. Much
more "margin" can be included. Much more safety can be
designed into the machine.
Let's examine a large heavy lift booster. There are other kinds
of nuclear rockets we could build, but we desperately need a heavy
lift booster if we are to excite people, catch their dreams, and
actually do big stuff in space.
The most powerful booster America has built to date was the Saturn
V. The size and weight of the Saturn V are easily accommodated by
existing infrastructure.
Lets use the Saturn V as a "template" for a nuclear powered
heavy lift booster. We will make the launcher roughly the same size,
weight and power as the Saturn V, and let's see how the performance
compares.
The most important difference between our new booster and the Saturn
V is in the engines. The Saturn V used five massively powerful F1
engines in the first stage, burning kerosene and liquid oxygen.
The mighty F1 produced 1.5 million pounds of thrust. Despite its
large size and power, the F1 was a very "relaxed" design.
It ran well inside the possible performance envelope. The reason
it did so was to increase reliability. This is a sound design principle,
so I will apply it to the new launcher wherever possible.
For an engine, I will designate a Gaseous Core Nuclear Reactor design,
of the Nuclear Lightbulb subvariant. I like the gas core design
for a number of reasons, and the nuclear lightbulb variant for several
more.
To recap, the efficiency and power of the thruster is based on the
difference in temperature between the fissioning mass and the reaction
mass. If you run a solid core NTR much above 3000 C, it melts. This
provides a firm "ceiling" on how efficient a solid core
reactor can be. A gas core design STARTS melted. In addition, since
all of the structure of the fuel mass is dynamic, a gas cored reactor
is inherently safer than a solid core device. If a "hot spot"
develops in a solid core, disaster ensues. If a hot spot develops
in a gas core, the hot spot superheats and "puffs" itself
out of existence. A gas core reactor is expected to operate at temperatures
of 25,000C. The much higher temperature gradient makes the thruster
inherently more efficient.
Second, a solid core reactor has a "fixed" core, since
it is solid. A gas core reactor does not, and the radioactive fuel
is easily "sucked" out of the core and stored in a highly
non-critical state completely out of the engine! The fuel storage
system I propose is a mass of thick walled boron-aluminum alloy
tubing. As I said above, the fuel proper is uranium hexaflouride
gas. UF6 is mean stuff, but we have decades of experience handling
it in gaseous diffusion plants, and common aluminum and standard
seals are available which resist attack from it. It is stoichiometric,
fluorine is low activation, and UF6 changes phase at moderate temperatures,
allowing it to be converted from high pressure gas to a solid and
back again using nothing fancier than gas cooling and electrical
heaters. This naturally makes dealing with the engine easier.
In addition, the design of the gas core allows the addition and
removal of fuel "on the fly." The core can also have its
density varied by control of the vortex, which directly affects
criticality. Both of these elements allow very potent control inputs
to be applied to a gas core reactor which are very stable and unaffected
by the isotopic condition of the fuel mass.
Also, to repeat, due to the extremely high temperature gradient
in the motor, the main cooling of the fissioning mass is not conductive
but radiative, a mode which is inherently less susceptible to perturbations.
(Having no working fluid for cooling means no material characteristics
for the working fluid must be considered.) This radiative cooling
mechanism is what allows the "lightbulb" system to work.
The silica bulb just has to be transparent enough to let the gigantic
power output of the fissioning core flow through, while keeping
the radioactive material of the core safely contained inside the
thruster. No radioactive materials leak out of the exhaust, it is
completely "clean."
Third, a gas cored reactor has several potential "scram"
modes, both fast and slow, and the speed of the reaction is easily
"throttled" by adding and removing fuel or by manipulating
the vortex. A 'scram' is an emergency shutdown, usually done in
a very fast way. For example: a gas cored reactor can be fast scrammed
by using a pressurized "shotgun" behind a weak window.
If the core exceeds the design parameters of the window, which are
to be slightly weaker than the silica "lightbulb," then
the "shotgun" blasts 150 or so kilos of boron/cadmium
pellets into the uranium gas, quenching the reaction immediately.
A slightly slower scram which is implemented totally differently
is to vary the gas jets in the core to instill a massive disturbance
into the fuel vortex. This disturbance would drastically reduce
criticality in the fission gas. A third scram mode, slightly slower
still, is to implement a high-speed vacuum removal of the fuel mass
into the storage system. Having three separate scram modes, one
of which is passively triggered, should instill plenty of safety
margin in the nuclear core of each thruster.
Extensive work was done on gas core reactors, and 25 years ago several
experimental designs were built and run successfully. There were
technical challenges, but nothing that seems insurmountable or even
especially difficult given our current computer and material skills.
The engine I propose is this:
A Gas cored NTR using a silica lightbulb. The silica bulb is cooled
and pressure-balanced against the thrust chamber by high pressure
hydrogen gas. The cooling gas from the silica bulb is used to power
three turbopumps "borrowed" from the Space Shuttle Main
Engine. These pumps are run at a very relaxed 88 percent of rated
power at their maximum setting. The three pumps move 178 kilos of
liquid hydrogen per second combined. Most of this is sprayed into
the thrust chamber. A portion of the liquid hydrogen is forced into
cooling channels for the thrust chamber and expansion nozzle, where
a portion of it is bled from micropores to form a cooling gas layer.
The gaseous hydrogen that is not bled then flows down the silica
lightbulb to cool it, and the cycle finally goes into powering the
turbopumps.
This engine produces 1,200,000 pounds of thrust, with an exhaust
velocity of 30,000 meters per second, from a thermal output of approximately
80 gigawatts. This equates to an Isp of 3060 seconds. Several sources
state that a gas core NTR can exceed 5000 seconds Isp, so 3060 is
well inside the overall performance envelope. The three turbopumps
from the SSME are run at low power levels, and even losing a pump
allows the engine to continue running as long as there is no damage
to the nuclear core. Lets assume this design is able to achieve
a thrust to weight ratio of ten to one, so the engine and all of
its safety systems, off-line fuel storage, etc, weighs 120,000 pounds.
I think we can build this engine easily for 60 tons.
We have the engine. Now to design the entire vehicle.
Since
we are using the Saturn V as our template, we will make the new
machine about the same weight, or six million pounds launch weight.
With our engines giving 1.2 million pounds of thrust, we need at
least five to get off the ground. But, since we have the power of
nuclear on our side, we will use seven engines instead of five.
Why seven? The most vulnerable moments of a rocket launch are the
first fifteen seconds after launch. If we have to scram a motor
in those fifteen seconds, having two extras is very comforting.
Engine failures further along the flight profile are much easier
to recover from, and having two spare engines allows us to be very
"chicken" on our criteria for scramming a motor. We can
shut one down even at one second after launch if we need to with
no risk of crashing the entire vehicle. This further lowers the
risk of nuclear power as a means of getting off the earth.
With seven engines, we have a thrust of 8.4 million pounds available.
In addition, the turbopumps can "overthrottle" the engines
easily in dire straits. This gets more thrust at the expense of
less Isp.
Let's design the vehicle for a total DeltaV of 15 km per second.
This is very high for a LEO booster, but the reason for it is to
allow enough reaction mass to perform a powered descent. In other
words, this is a true spaceship, that flies up and then can fly
back down again.
The formula to calculate DeltaV from a rockets mass is:
DeltaV = c * ln(M0/M1).
'c' is exhaust velocity of the engines and equals 30,000 m/s.
'ln' is the natural log.
'M0' is the initial mass of the vehicle, and we have set this to
be 6 million pounds.
'M1' is the mass of the vehicle when it runs dry of reaction mass.
The value of M1 is what we need to find, since we know we want a
total DeltaV of 15,000 m/s.
Doing a little simple math, we find we need 2,400,000 pounds of
reaction mass. Since we are using liquid hydrogen, we can now calculate
the size of the hydrogen tank needed, which is 15,200 cubic meters.
This works out to be a whopping 20 meters in diameter and 55 meters
long!
We look at the Saturn V and find our new booster is going to be
quite plump compared to the sleek Saturn V, but we have no choice
if we want to use liquid hydrogen as reaction mass. Since hydrogen
is the best reaction mass physics allows, and is cheap, plentiful,
and we have decades of experience handling it, we will use it.
A design height of 105 meters seems reasonable. We assign 15 meters
to the engines, 55 meters for the hydrogen tank, 5 meters for shielding
and crew space, and a modular cargo area which is 30 meters high
and 20 meters in diameter. This is enough cargo space for a good
sized office building!
How heavy is the rest of the vehicle? Well, we already decided that
the engines are going to weigh 120,000 pounds each, for a total
of 840,000 pounds. (To make a comparison, the entire Saturn V, all
three stages, engines and all, weighed a mere 414,000 pounds dry.)
Let's splurge here. With nuclear power, we have the power to splurge.
Let's use 760,000 pounds to build all of the structure of the new
booster. We use thicker and stronger metal, we use extra layers
of redundancy, we make it strong and safe and reliable.
We have now used 2,400,000 pounds for reaction mass, 840,000 pounds
for the engines, and 760,000 pounds for the rest of the ship's dry
structure. This adds up to 4,000,000 pounds, fully built, fully
fueled, ready to launch.
But we said at the beginning, the booster has a design launch weight
of 6,000,000 pounds! If it only weighs 4 million pounds ready to
launch, the rest must be cargo capacity.
This machine has a Low Earth Orbit cargo capacity of TWO MILLION
POUNDS.
It is fully reusable. We gave it enough fuel to fly back safely
from orbit.
It has MASSIVE redundancy and multiple levels of safety mechanisms.
Its exhaust is completely clean: It is very difficult to make hydrogen
radioactive in a fission reactor. It basically can't happen.
It flies to space with a thousand tons of cargo, and flies back
using some gentle aero-braking and its thrusters with another thousand
tons of cargo.
This means it has eight times the cargo capacity of the Saturn V,
which was not reusable at all. No longer will the Saturn V be the
mightiest American rocket. No more resting on our laurels.
With this sort of performance potential, can anyone argue that NTR's
are NOT the only sensible course for heavy lift boosters?
There are risks, of course, but careful design and the proper launch
site can easily mitigate those risks so that the huge advantages
of nuclear propulsion can be realized.
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Contents:
1:
The Frontier Spirit
2:
What went wrong.
3:
Where do we go next?
4:
So, why aren't we going?
5:
Dealing with the Devil
6:
A brief technical interlude
7:
So how good is Nuclear, anyway?
8:
Heat, temperature, and cooling.
9:
But isn't this dangerous?
10: Prometheus
would be proud of us.
11:
Ok, that all sounds nice, but this is just fantasy, right?
12:
But isn't this just too big?
13:
But doesn't this thing make nuclear waste?
14:
Conclusions
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