Nuclear Propulsion

In my last blog post, I wrote about a type of propulsion that would provide extremely high fuel efficiency with the trade off of using extremely large amounts of electrical power. What I will be writing about in this blog is a crazy sounding method of providing thrust that is practically the polar opposite of the ion thruster.

This method uses hybrid fission/fusion nuclear bombs as fuel. The idea is that the bombs would be ejected out the back of an extremely large space ship with a bell shaped protrusion attached to a giant “spring” on the back. When the bombs reached the edge of the bell, they would be detonated, and the half of the matter/energy cloud that has “forward” momentum would hit the bell, compressing the spring so that the energy is not pushing the spacecraft all at once (which would be the equivalent to nuking it.

The reason that it cannot just be any bomb, but has to be a nuclear bomb, specifically a fusion bomb, is that the energy produced per weight of a nuclear fusion bomb has no man-made comparison. It is not just a fraction more efficient, it is millions of times as efficient. Plutonium, being 1.75 times as dense as lead, is quite dense, but the hydrogen used in the fusion part of the bomb is the lightest element in existence, and produces multitudes of the power as even Plutonium.

One obvious problem would be the manufacturing of the nuclear materials. This would be quite simple with minor modifications to any of the reactors from my previous blogs, or even current nuclear reactors. I am not going to say anything else related to the manufacture of nuclear bombs, because, well...

Another problem would be the bell structure. It would have to be light, otherwise you ended up where you started. It would have to be able to withstand massive temperature variance from the near absolute zero temperature of space to the extreme heat of the nuclear flash. It would also have to block the radiation from the nuclear blasts from the ship without damaging itself. And, of course, the shock waves from the nuclear blasts that would be its primary purpose. This is unfeasible with our current material technology, but perhaps in a later blog, I will discuss some materials that could be used to accomplish this, but for now, I am going to stay on the topic of space.