WhiteHouse.Gov petition to develop nuclear thermal rockets

On Jan 29, 2013, at 7:29 AM, Joe Strout wrote:

> On 1/28/13 8:41 PM, Al Globus wrote:
>
> > I don't think this is a particularly good project right now. We need
> > to focus federal dollars on projects with potential commercial legs,
> > such as tourism and space solar power, and projects with direct
> > benefit to those on the ground such as asteroid defense, Earth and
> > solar observation, materials procession, and bio-medical research on
> > the ISS. We spend plenty of money on really interesting and
> > wonderful but not particularly useful (to the taxpayers on the
> > ground) space projects. Given the federal gov't debts, we should
> > assume NASA will lose quite a bit of funding over the next few years
> > and spend what's left wisely.
>
> I agree with the general sentiments, but I'm not sure I agree with the
> specifics. Things like asteroid defense and mining would be
> dramatically easier with NTR, don't you think?
>
If it were free, yes. However, it isn't. We're pretty close to having very good electric propulsion for most asteroid mining tasks near term, it's a matter of scaling up existing systems to more power (read: larger solar arrays), around 40 KW for a vehicle that can bring a 500 ton asteroid into high earth orbit.

>
> As for budget realities, I'd be quite content to cancel NASA's current
> heavy-lift launcher and put the money into NTR development instead.
> There is no reason NASA should continue to be in the launch business.
>
> If they want X tons of material in orbit Y, they should simply offer to
> pay $Z to whoever gets it there safely. There are companies who will
> step up to the plate, probably far more cheaply than NASA could do it
> itself.
>
Leaving aside the Senate Launch System (SLS) shoved down the administration's throat, that is exactly what NASA is doing. There's the COTS program for cargo, which has funded much of Falcon 9 development, and commercial crew, which is the same basic idea but for astronauts (you need more-better abort modes and bigger safety margins, and possibly a smoother ride).