Re:Two potentially life-friendly planets found orbiting a ne...
by r00fus on Tuesday June 18, 2019 @01:19PM
(#20215558)
The propulsion could work. What about sustaining life for 200 year biospehere without any external resources?
What about interstellar debris?
What about deceleration?
And that's just the feasibility of the colony ship, then there's colonization/terraforming, etc.
I'd be thrilled to see such an effort take shape, but to say "it would work" has marginal relevance to "the project is feasible".
A pusher plate can in fact transfer net positive momentum from a series of explosive shockwaves detonated aft of the pusher plate in the desired direction of travel. There’s plenty of video footage from the Hot Rod tests showing it working. https://youtu.be/Q8Sv5y6iHUM
The hot rod test article was actually donated to the national air and space museum unfortunately it is not currently on display. https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/propulsion-tes...
And for the realities of scaling up from conventional explosives to nuclear detonations you can read a little more here http://www.spacedaily.com/news/nuclearspace-03h.html and http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/realdesigns2.ph... (scroll down till you get tot project Orion and they have a pretty good summary) And the Project Rho information has links to lots of the technical details and material as well if you want to learn a lot more.