GoKawiilMy purpose, and my belief, is that the bombs that killed and maimed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki shall one day open the skies to man. —Freeman Dyson, A Space Traveler’s Manifesto, 1958
The nuclear pulse rocket is what you’d get if you hired a 12 year old to get you to Jupiter. It works by farting a continuous string of nuclear bombs (at the rate of about one per second) out its back end and riding the ensuing blast waves on a giant shock absorber, like a pogo stick. A series of hundreds or thousands of nuclear detonations accelerates the spacecraft to pretty much any speed you want, and when it’s time to slow down, you just turn around and start nuking in the forward direction.
Simple, easy, and fun!
The performance on this thing is sensational. Rocket engineers have always been stuck having to choose between thrust and efficiency. Chemical rockets that are powerful enough to get things off the ground (like Saturn V or Starship) are hopelessly inefficient, while the efficient ion motors we put on probes and satellites have only a few ounces of thrust. It’s like forever being forced to choose between an electric tricycle and a top fuel dragster, with no middle ground.
Like an El Camino rolling coal, nuclear pulse rockets occupy that missing middle. The energy density of nuclear fuel gives them incredible miles to the mushroom cloud, while thrust is only limited by how much the hammering the spaceship can take before shaking apart. Where the Apollo rockets had six stages and a mass ratio of about 540:1 (for every kilo of astronaut or spacecraft that landed back on Earth, you needed more than half a ton of fully-fueled rocket on the launch pad), a nuclear pulse rocket has a mass ratio closer to 1.5. It can take off from Earth, land 4,000 tons of scientists and equipment on Mars, and come back in one piece to refuel, as many times as you want.
That kind a mass budget is what Mars mission planners call ‘ample’. Consider that the International Space Station, the biggest object ever assembled in space, weighs 400 tons. Nuclear pulse propulsion means no more worrying about life support or radiation. You can stock the inside with all the oxygen and frozen steaks a crew can eat, encase the whole thing in radiation-blocking plastic, cap it with a glass-domed rotating casino for the view, and still have room for the thousands of fission bombs (dispensed like coke cans) you will need to detonate to get the thing moving. A crew on such a rocket would travel to Mars in comfort and style and arrive refreshed.
For that matter, they could travel to Saturn and arrive refreshed. An early 1958 design envisioned sending a crew of 20 to Enceladus and back within a span of three years, or about as long as it would take to fly astronauts to Mars and back on a conventional mission using chemical rockets. And they could do it in a fully reusable vehicle on a single launch from Earth.
In short, the nuclear pulse rocket solves all of the problems that plague chemical rockets, albeit at the cost of replacing them with much bigger, scarier problems.
Here are some other representative missions enabled by nuclear thunder:
Soft-land 5,700 tons on the Moon (compare to 17 tons for Apollo)
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