My interview on the Space Show is now available for downloading as a 26 megabyte MP4 right HERE. This one covers Project Orion, ol’ nuclear bang-bang. The discussion kinda wanders around some.
So, download, give it a listen, point and laugh. I’m listening to it now and recognizing once again that while I have a face for radio, I have voice for print. At least this time, the audio troubles that plagued my last interview don’t seem to have arisen this time.
Every now and then ebay provides some interesting items that are just plain too expensive. One such is a Boeing presentation on using the 747 to carry and air-launch MX ICBMs. The original Buy It Now price was over two grand; consequently, the document remained on ebay for something like a year. However, I negotiated down to $250. Still too expensive, but crowdfunding makes it reasonably affordable.
I currently have about 9 people interested in splitting the cost. Nine plus me means the cost is $25 per person… suddenly not quite so horrible. If more people come on board, the price will fall even more. Twenty people total drops it to $12.50 each. Thirty drops it to $8.33, and so on. Each contributor gets a complete high-rez scan of the document.
If you are interested in getting in on this, it’s open to APR Patreon patrons at all levels. Check out the APR Patreon for this and other rewards. The most recent posting at the APR Patreon has a place to comment and express your interest in getting a copy of this document.
The opportunity will be open until the document arrives in the mail, which should be a few days.
Some good news:
A few hundred thousand years of recoverable uranium is available in seawater, and technology improvements are making it economically feasible. Chemical adsorbtion nets are collecting about 6 grams of uranium per kilogram of adsorbent per fifty days, for a cost of about $200 per pound of uranium oxide… about twice the current market rate. And even at that rate, the technology exists to negate any argument about nuclear power being a limited energy source.
Enough uranium is available to also negate any argument against constructing a fleet of 4,000 ton Orion vehicles to conquer the solar system out to Ceres.
I drove past this truck yesterday, north of Brigham City. To me it sure looks like an old Minuteman ICBM transporter truck; if so, it almost certainly wasn’t actually transporting an ICBM, or I’ve expected more of an escort.
Screenshots from my craptacular $35 dashcam.
A bit of googling finds that that’s almost certainly what it was…
What you don’t want to do with one of these things:
Whoops.
Now, a thought occurs to me. I suspect that these transporters just aren’t used as much as they once were. I suspect most of them have been recycled. But if – *if*, mind you – you had excess money *and* you were able to get one of these surplus… imagine what an *awesome* RV you could make out of it. Heck, design it to keep the “erector” function, with necessary amenities either properly locked down or able to rotate so that it’s functional either horizontal or vertical. And way up front, that’s where you’d put your combination bedroom/observatory, complete with telescope.
The article mentions that a desalination plant near Santa Barbara can be brought online with the expenditure of buckets of cash… and that the plant has been sitting there, idle, for 25 years.
Apparently, it was built during a drought, and about the moment it came online the drought ended, so they stopped running the plant. But the thing that gets me: during all the time that California supposedly hasn’t needed the water, California has been draining the Colorado river dry. Which leads to *this* news story:
Yeah, desalination is expensive. But then again, so are social programs and prisons and sanctuary cities. So I have no sympathy for a state that is rich as hell, blows it’s money on silly nonsense and ignores the things it needs to do. If California would build a hundred desal plants along the cast, each with its own nuclear powerplant, much of Californias water problem could be dealt with during droughts. And when the droughts end, the nuclear powerplants would power the state.
Something California doesn’t seem to understand is that there are *other* states that rely on the Colorado River… states that, unlike California, don’t have a vast ocean coastline to fall back on. I wonder about the possibility of states like Nevada and Arizona suing the bejeezus out of California, suing them for, say, a trillion dollars. *That* might inspire the California state government to finally shake off the scourge of Greenpeace and the like and doing what needs to be done to actually protect the environment.
In short: the anti-nuclear movement has been so successful at halting the development of new reactors that old reactors have had to remain in place, serving well past their originally intended use-by date; with the result that the Belgian government is apparently in something of a panic about their reactors.
Good job, Greens. Thanks to you there may soon be radioactive Walloons running around. And does anybody know what sort of superpowers a person would get if they’re bitten by a radioactive Walloon? I sure as hell don’t.
On the face of it, this is an idea I approve of: not only more nuclear reactors, but mobile, floating nuclear reactors. Something I would love to see the US do, and something at on a certain level I approve of China or virtually anybody else doing.
The problem I foresee is that I expect that the Chinese contractors will half-ass this like they seem to do everything. Components that are supposed to be made of cadmium will instead be made out of cat food. Emergency coolant systems fabricated from papier mache. Nuclear engineers replaced with slave laborers.
The end result I’m afraid of is one or more of these floating reactors blowing its top, melting down, or getting zapped by an Exocet, trashing a substantial region. The usal pack of baying anti-nuclear zealots will then dutifully take this as an example of why nukes are Teh Ebil, and the American/Western nuclear programs will take another hit. While at the same time the Chinese will probably just shrug, write off the lost reactor, nonchalantly shoot a couple dozen stooges, and crank out a bagrillion more reactors and coal burning powerplants.
I have a potential solution. So long as we allow political correctness on federally funded universities, including blocking certain otherwise protected political speech, then I propose that if the Chinese manage to make themselves a crappy reactor and cause trouble, anyone who proposes to use that incident to tar the *American* nuclear program will be deported to China. America is thus a “safe space” for honest discussion of nuclear power, and blaming American nukes for the dumbass decisions of Russian or Chinese collectivist stooges, or Japanese dumbasses who thought it would be a neato-keen idea to locate a reactor in a tsunami zone is hereby banned.
Is it real, or is it Photoshop? Neither would especially surprise me. It would be best, though, to work under the assumption that a technology that the US figured out nearly *sixty* years ago might be achievable by lesser powers.
More photos at the Yonhap News site.
Now available: two new US Aerospace Projects titles.
US Bomber Projects #18 is now available (see HERE for the entire series). Issue #18 includes:
USBP #18 can be downloaded as a PDF file for only $4:
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US Transport Projects #06 is now available (see HERE for the entire series). Issue #06 includes:
USTP #06 can be downloaded as a PDF file for only $4:
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And don’t forget…
US Fighter Projects #1 and US VTOL Projects #1 are still new and still available!
And then there’s this: I’ve roughly finished another Pax Orionis yarn: “Birth of the Bomb.” It’s a greatly expanded, completely re-written version of a snippet I have previously posted and, perhaps shockingly, it’s not grimdark but rather the opposite (in a way). This one deals not with war but exploration. It’s somewhat longer than “The Deadliest Catch,” so it’ll be in two parts.
I’m currently going over it, tinkering. I need to add the Technical Diagram (a helicopter is mentioned in the story, and I’ve been tempted to draw *that,* but I’ve decided to stick with more Orion-based diagrams for the time being) and a few other bits, but I should have Part One available for Pax Orionis patrons in a week or two. So if you are interested, take a look at the Pax Orionis Patreon page.
