I’d posted this YouTube video a few years ago, but I’ve found that not only was the video yanked, the whole account associated with it was nuked. Hmmmph.
A film about NERVA (Nuclear Energy for Rocket Vehicle Applications), 1968.
Provides a basic description of nuclear rockets, plus some art, animation and diagrams of nuclear propelled space vehicles along with footage of test firings.
A piece of artwork yanked out of a Russian book, attributed to Rockwell. This appears to show a Mars-bound (or perhaps Mars-orbiting) spacecraft equipped with two biconic entry vehicles. The long truss structure and radiators would indicate a nuclear powered vehicle, presumably NERVA.
Just under the wire, rewards for November have been made available to APR patrons. Three documents and one large-format diagram, and one all-new CAD diagram, have been posted:
If you’d like to help out and gain access to these and past and future rewards, please check out the APR Patreon.
The image quality is admittedly terrible (being a scan of a print of a microfilm), but this might be of interest… a piece of NASA art circa 1963 depicting the Saturn V with an S-N third stage rather than an S-IVb third stage. The S-N was not a fixed design, but varied over the years; here, it was a fairly stubby stage ten meters in diameter, same as the S-IC and S-II stage. The S-N would vary in diameter and length from design to design, but one common element was the use of a single NERVA solid-core nuclear thermal rocket engine. As shown here, the distance from the nuclear rocket to the Apollo capsule up front just isn’t terribly far; consequently, this depicted a design with extraordinary levels of shielding, or depicted an unmanned Apollo (but then, why the abort tower), or it was just artistic license.
These are vastly-reduced versions of some of the diagrams I may include as rewards for Patreon patronage. Not all are unbuilt aerospace projects, obviously, but all are, I trust, of interest to those interested in aerospace. If interested, please consider joining my Patreon campaign. Also to be provided are PDFs of aerospace documents
A film about NERVA (Nuclear Energy for Rocket Vehicle Applications), 1968.
[youtube WoiVej1rccs]
Provides a basic description of nuclear rockets, plus some art, animation and diagrams of nuclear propelled space vehicles along with footage of test firings.
Just a reminder…
After hiatus, I am again offering cyanotype blueprints of various aerospace subjects on paper. These include the V-2, the Saturn Ib and V, the NERVA nuclear rocket, the Super Hustler, and many more.What says “Merry Christmas” better than a gift of a hand-made, awesome-looking large format cyanotype blueprint of a launch vehicle or nuclear bombardment system?
See the complete list here:
http://www.aerospaceprojectsreview.com/catalog/cyan.htm
And while I’m not at liberty to go into the specifics, I recently provided a number of these to a certain ongoing major TV series to be used as set dressing/props. The episodes will air sometime early next spring, I believe. They should look marvelous…
Conventional nuclear thermal rockets such as the NERVA can have a specific impulse of around 900 seconds, about twice what you can get from conventional chemical rocket engines. That’s good, but it’s also really low compared to what could be obtained from nuclear thermal systems. Solid core NTR’s have core temperatures substantially cooler than what you’d see in, say, an SSME, and for good reason: the core would soften and fail if it got much hotter. Thus the reason for the high performance of NTR’s is not due to high temperature, but to low molecular weight of the propellant (pure hydrogen, rather than water vapor for the SSME). But what if the core wasn’t limited to the low temperature of an NTR?
One way to do that is the gas-core engine. Here the uranium is allowed to not only melt, but to vaporize. It it retrained in the engine, typically, by spinning the engine or at leas the vapor. Thus the dense uranium vapor is spun out to the walls of the engine, and the much lighter hydrogen propellant is in the core. The keep the walls of the engine from melting, the hydrogen is first released into the engine from the walls themselves. The hydrogen bubbles up through the seething uranium gas, taking heat from the uranium as it does so.
Another approach is illustrated below, the Coaxial Flow Gaseous Nuclear Rocket. Here, instead of uranium spun to the walls, vaporized plutonium is retained along the centerline of the engine, with hydrogen flowing around it.
In these cases, specific impulses can get in the range of 5,000 seconds. But the problems with these designs were many. Startup and shutdown would have been lengthy and complicated processes. In the best cases, some of the fissionable gas would have escaped, meaning excess would need to be carried. In the coaxial system, it’s not entirely clear just *how* the hydrogen was to keep the plutonium vapor in place.
