'To the end of the solar system', the story of the nuclear rocket by James A. Dewar.
This book is basically about the political history to push along the development of nuclear rocket propulsion. It does have a fair amount of detail about the design and engineering problems of nuclear rocketry. The book details the ups and downs of political interest in nuclear rockets in the US before during and after project Apollo. It also gives some interesting advice in any possible space project in the future to keep the political fickleness from threatening a project cancellation. Justify the project early on in a specific direction, not as a technology development, hoping for a future mission. Most of all fly something sooner rather than latter! Some of the more interesting tests and incidences in the rocket program. After an engine test a bird landed on the nozzle (the rockets were fired upside down) the bird was asphyxiated by the purge gas (not by radiation) and fell into the engine! The engineers fretted about what to do. If they fired the engine again would the carcass damage anything when it was flung out? They rigged some remote cameras and fished the dead bird out. The bird was encased in a block of plastic and kept as project momento! Some of the earliest tests ejected a lot of graphite and fissile fuel. One test purposely ran the rocket out of liquid hydrogen propellant to see how bad the resulting thermal runaway explosion would be. Turned out to be quite small. It would still be a tuff sell today to anti Nuke people that a nuclear rocket can be done safely. However from the looks of what was done and could be done 1000 to 1500 ISP is possible, well worth the extra trouble for deep space flight. A copy is available at the Colorado State University library and possibly other university libraries. Call number is TL783.D48 2004 Publisher : University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, Ky. ISBN 0813122678 I think its a great book. - Edward Rupp _______________________________________________ ERPS-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.erps.org/mailman/listinfo/erps-list
