"And if they do that," Dr. Rankine said from his position at one of the analysis stations, "We'll just fire Zeus up again and blow a hole in the cement. Peak thrust of four and a half million newtons—call it just over a million pounds."
"Sweet! That'll give us something to fly from here to Mars on!"
"I still prefer 'Old Bang-Bang,'" grumbled Dr. Hiroshi Kanzaki.
Jackie rolled her eyes. The Japanese engineer's attachment to the old Orion design had always struck her as just barely short of obsessive.
"Oh, sure," she jibed. "That would be a lot easier to get authorized. 'Hi, we're going to take this huge honkin' plate of steel, put our ship on top, and then light off a chain of nuclear bombs under our asses to get us moving. In your back yard.'"
Kanzaki was never one to take a jibe without a rejoinder. "Well, you can't argue that us going for the nuclear rocket hasn't taken the heat off your boyfriend."
"A.J. is not my boyfriend!" Jackie replied automatically, for what was probably the three thousandth time.
The rest of what Kanzaki had said was true enough. The Ares Project also needed nuclear reactors to pull off some of the projected stunts, like generating new fuel on Mars for the return trip. If the government hadn't already been planning to make extensive use of nuclear technology in space for its own projects, A.J. and his fellow Nuts would have had hell's own time trying to convince anyone to let them fire off something loaded with fissionable materials into the sky.
"No doubt. I'm sure they're all grateful for that minor favor. Still, it means we get the real drive system while they're playing with bottle rockets."
That was greeted with another euphoric roar of agreement. Ever since they began, the space programs of the world had been stuck using chemical fuels to catapult loads into space. While that was perfectly acceptable for simple small orbital work, the fact remained that to explore the rest of the solar system demanded some other method of propelling a spaceship.
Many alternatives had been proposed, but they all had one of two disadvantages. Either, like solar sails or electric drive systems— sometimes called "ion" drives—they provided miniscule amounts of thrust. Or, they required a power source of such magnitude that only something like a nuclear reactor could provide the oomph needed.
In the case of Orion—"Old Bang-Bang," in their parlance— the design cut out the middleman entirely and detonated nuclear explosives like firecrackers under a tin can to kick a truly impressive payload upwards. However, with the paranoia against all things nuclear—even controlled reactions like NERVA—no such design had ever really been given a chance to get off the ground, so to speak.
But with the impetus to get to Mars suddenly in overdrive, it was clear that some superior drive system would be needed for the projected spaceship that NASA intended to send to Phobos and, thence, to Mars. With that demand, the NERVA program—Nuclear Energy for Rocket Vehicle Applications—had been reborn. Even in its prototype stages two-thirds of a century before, NERVA had demonstrated the immense thrust of two hundred and fifty thousand pounds. The specific impulse, which meant the amount of time that one pound of propellant could be used to produce a thrust of one pound of force, had been over eight hundred seconds—far greater than that which could be obtained from chemical sources.
While other theoretical systems, such as VASIMR, offered superior overall performance, they remained theoretical. All of them required major technological breakthroughs, such as controlled commercial fusion—still eternally twenty years away—or specialized materials design. NERVA was in fact the simplest overall concept available. It used nuclear power to heat reaction mass to tremendous temperatures and pressures, and then let it squirt out. Simple, but with proper design reasonably efficient and vastly powerful.
"What was our specific impulse?" she asked.
"Eight hundred ninety-two seconds," Rankine answered smugly. "Pushing the calculated limits already. I'll bet with tuning we can crack the nine hundred second barrier!"
Jackie's phone pinged. "Yes?"
A.J.'s image appeared in front of her, courtesy of her VRD. "Congratulations, Jackie! Looks like you hit a million pounds of thrust there!"
"How the hell do you know that? You didn't play Tinkerbell with me, did you?"
A.J. gave an exaggerated look of wounded pride. "How could you even consider such a thing, Jackie?"
"Because it's just the kind of thing you'd do!"
He waved a finger in the manner of a prissy teacher. "Certainly not. Planting unapproved sensors inside that complex would be illegal, and the last thing I want is to get hauled up before the law."