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Russia Thinks It Can Use Nukes to Fly to Mars in 45 Days—If It Can Find the Rubles

Rogue Valley

Rogue Valley

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Russia Thinks It Can Use Nukes to Fly to Mars in 45 Days—If It Can Find the Rubles

Last week, their national nuclear corporation Rosatom announced it is building a nuclear engine that will reach Mars in a month and a half—with fuel to burn for the trip home. Russia might not achieve its goal of launching a prototype by 2025. But that has more to do with the country’s financial situation (not great) than the technical challenges of a nuclear engine. Rosatom did not respond to questions about their system’s specs, but its announcement hints at some sort of thermal fission. Which is to say, the engine would generate heat by splitting atoms and use that heat to burn hydrogen or some other chemical. Burning stuff goes one direction, spaceship goes the other.
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Russia is in a bad place financially. I don't see them pouring many rubles into this scheme.
 
Re: Russia Thinks It Can Use Nukes to Fly to Mars in 45 Days—If It Can Find the Ruble

Probably a non-story. So long as Russia's economy is depressed and oil prices stay low there is little investment they can make in anything.
 
Re: Russia Thinks It Can Use Nukes to Fly to Mars in 45 Days—If It Can Find the Ruble

calamity said:
There are acceleration limits on the human body. A 45 day manned mission to mars will never be possible.
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22 days at 1g will get you going pretty fast.
 
Re: Russia Thinks It Can Use Nukes to Fly to Mars in 45 Days—If It Can Find the Ruble

If you maintain 1g, flipping at the halfway point, you'd get to mars in about 2 days.
 
Re: Russia Thinks It Can Use Nukes to Fly to Mars in 45 Days—If It Can Find the Ruble

Citizen.Seven said:
If you maintain 1g, flipping at the halfway point, you'd get to mars in about 2 days.
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If you maintain 1g, you will stand in place, never leaving the ground.
 
Re: Russia Thinks It Can Use Nukes to Fly to Mars in 45 Days—If It Can Find the Ruble

calamity said:
If you maintain 1g, you will stand in place, never leaving the ground.
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Heh. It depends on how you maintain 1g.
 
Re: Russia Thinks It Can Use Nukes to Fly to Mars in 45 Days—If It Can Find the Ruble

Citizen.Seven said:
Heh. It depends on how you maintain 1g.
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Yeah, I looked at some numbers. It appears that at constant acceleration of 1 g in 0-gravity, you would reach max relativistic speed within about a year. So, I guess, if you can get whatever you need to maintain 1g acceleration up into space, you're good to go all over the place quite quickly--Jupiter in only a few days.
 
Re: Russia Thinks It Can Use Nukes to Fly to Mars in 45 Days—If It Can Find the Ruble

NASA after doing their prolonged sleep trials are actually thinking about making the trip to mars a three day trip, through laser propulsion. The same technology that was theorized to be used to construct a Space Based Solar Network and everyone thought it wasn't feasible, well, they are thinking about doing it.
 
Re: Russia Thinks It Can Use Nukes to Fly to Mars in 45 Days—If It Can Find the Ruble

NASA under Werner Von Braun had a similar plan to get to Mars in the 1970's, they would use NERVA rockets which were nuclear powered. The initial testing was highly successful but the government killed the program in favor of the space shuttle. Bah. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA
 
Re: Russia Thinks It Can Use Nukes to Fly to Mars in 45 Days—If It Can Find the Ruble

When they do it, I wil care much.

Until then, I probably won't.
 
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