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Bringer of the Second Nuclear Age
Thorium Molten Salt Reactors – A Really Short Intro Thorium is about thrice as abundant compared to Uranium. And countless times more abundant than the U-235 Uranium isotope that is used mostly by...
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Thorium MSR Design Possibilities
There are a huge array of design possibilities for a Thorium molten salt reactor / liquid fluoride thorium reactor, but this post takes a very simplified approach to map a small part of the fascinating...
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FLEX – Flexible Exploration Architecture
I wrote this architecture proposal, FLEX, a few years ago. It analyzes NASA’s approach that the ESAS study picked and notices how most of the mass in a lunar exploration stack in LEO is actually liquid...
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What NASA Should Do
And partly what this blog is about (I realized in the middle that I’m typing like in a slide show, so I changed it into bullet points, as it’s an overview and not a deep text). I present my vision that...
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Lunar Bases Must Be Buried
Concept art of lunar bases tends to show spherical or cylindrical structures, but they suffer from one problem: radiation. (Both of the gamma / particle and heat kinds). The lunar environment has lots...
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Heavy Lift Unnecessary
There are a lot of implicit assumptions that heavy lifters of this or that throw weight must be used for future exploration beyond low Earth orbit. These “needs” have never been logically derived from...
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Reality and Future
Jeff Greason is a rational person who simply gets it. It is mind boggling how completely opposite from someone like Mike Griffin he is. See Jeff’s presentation with the Augustine Panel. Paraphrasing,...
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Dual Propellant Expander
Or what you are going to call it, an unrealized proposal from Aerojet around 1984. PDF Found on NTRS. The idea was to have two turbopumps (like on SSME), but instead operate on the expander cycle. Two...
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Far Away, Yet So Close
He who controls the [Earth-Moon Lagrange points/Phobos/Deimos/Lunar North Pole], controls the solar system. Why? Because in space, it is not the tyranny of distance that sets the rules – it’s delta vee...
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Humans Fast, Machines Slow
Rand Simberg talks about impedance matching. So I’d like to make a post of my comment there (I’ve always wondered why this obvious alternative gets mentioned so little…) What to do when you arrive at...
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