Oh and on FF drives, fhey're kind of messy and risk pollution if they fail near earth (though not nearly as much as other nuclear designs). It's fine for scientific missions, but becomes much more eyebrow raising en masse for a Mars colonization type effort.

IIRC the fissile material needs to be relatively high grade.

[–] Balex@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I don't know if I quite agree with that being a morale issue. But that same logic nuclear reactors are immoral because if they blow up they can cause a lot of harm.

I do agree that it is a little sketchy for human flight, but they wouldn't use it if there was a significant chance of it harming the people on board.

[–] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

, but they wouldn’t use it if there was a significant chance of it harming the people on board.

This is spaceflight. There is always a tremendous chance of harm to people on board, even with speculative nuclear technology to get the spacecraft a little less like thin paper bags.

I would highly recommend reading up on Project Rho, on somewhat feasable near term technologies if we can just figure out the engineering: https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/

They're awesome, and I hope they get funded. But it will also dispell any illusuion you have of spaceflight being remotely practical on a large scale.