Fission fragment rocket for DRA5 mission

[p1t1o]

49 minutes ago, Ten Key said:

Nuclear powered submarines also make oxygen from seawater. 

https://www.ussnautilus.org/education/pdf/stemlessons/harris _How-Do-Submariners-Breathe-Underwater.pdf

NP. Just fill up a few of the missile tubes with LOx. Should last a great deal of time.

Dont get me wrong. Im not an advocate for converting subs to spacecraft, but you have to admit, the crossover is striking.

 

They are at least a proof-of-concept for:

 

Keeping humans alive in a closed environment for strategically relevant lengths of time.

Humans working in a closed environment with a nuclear reactor, extracting not only power, but propulsion as well from it, with a very wide operating regime (must be stable rapidly and repeatedly cycling from very low to very high power),

A vehicle that can reliably protect its crew from an environment that is harshly incompatible with human life.

Do all of this whilst communicating and navigating (and fighting) in an environment as different from day-to-day life on land, as space is.

Do all of this whilst only being able to refresh supplies on a very periodic basis, but also with the capability of doing so mid-mission, and we have the infrastructure large and complex enough to facilitate.

 

Yes its far too heavy, and the reactor needs to be redesigned, and it will require extensive re-equipping.They'll have to remove all the chairs!

But as far as existing vehicles go, they are the closest we've got to large manned space vessels, and are surprisingly so, considering.

[DerekL1963]

10 hours ago, Ten Key said:

Nuclear powered submarines also make oxygen from seawater. 

https://www.ussnautilus.org/education/pdf/stemlessons/harris _How-Do-Submariners-Breathe-Underwater.pdf

Hydrogen, oxygen, caustic electrolyte, and high voltage electric current - what could go wrong?  (The O2 generators were known in the fleet as "bombs", a reputation well earned.)

9 hours ago, p1t1o said:

But as far as existing vehicles go, they are the closest we've got to large manned space vessels, and are surprisingly so, considering.

I've been telling people for years that submariners are a better for space than pilots.

[DDE]

17 hours ago, DerekL1963 said:

I've been telling people for years that submariners are a better for space than pilots.

I arrived to a similar conclusion, actually. Heck, the Baltic fleet's long-range reconnaissance teams during WWII (i.e. guys who spent months at a time camping out in wind-blasted, pedant-ridden mountains to report on steel and tungsten shipments out of Kirkenes) recruited people who were either Norwegian or submariner.

 

[DerekL1963]

She's wrong about the noise though...  The hull only creaks when changing depth.  Though at deep depth it can be a bit much sometimes.

And what junior officer has time to sleep?

Edited September 23, 2017 by DerekL1963