Re: This won't help with the support of JIMO

[Michael Turner]

Just a kind of random thought here ....   Getting plutonium safely away from Earth and to some moon base, or orbital construction facility near the moon, or at a libration point, seems like a real challenge.  To do it economically might be even more of a challenge.  How do you package it for all scenarios?  For fission-powered probes to Jupiter, this might be the biggest political and technical challenge of all.   I don't think I can address all scenarios with one idea, but ... I read a book by Freeman Dyson's son, about Project Orion, in which an interesting experiment was devised at thermonuclear bomb test sites.  They dangled some metal spheres (copper, IIRC) fairly close to ground zero.  These spheres survived with remarkably little damage.  And were used as supporting evidence that Orion could work.   Last year, a friend of mine, professor of mechanical engineering, sent me a copy of a formal request for proposals for some research into demisable satellite fuel tanks, asking if I had any ideas.  I sent him a few, and I don't know what's become of my suggestions, but it struck me: a hollow metal object is pretty hard to kill with atmospheric reentry.  Most satellites self-dispose of their parts pretty nicely, and could be made even better in this respect with more investment.  But tanks made of aluminum alloys frequently come back nearly intact.  Getting them to burn up nicely is actually a hard, and largely unsolved, problem.   Well, so roughly spherical, mostly empty, metal objects are tough buggers.  Make the most of it.  Send plutonium up inside spheres, suspended in a mesh of very strong wire or fiber.  Your rocket blows up?  It's OK, so long as you can track the payload.  Launch goes off course and the payload reenters?  It's OK, so long as you can track it.  Something hits it (debris, meteor) in transit ... well, that I can't tell you anything about.  But maybe there are shielding concepts that are both lightweight and strong enough to handle almost anything at this point.   No point in thinking about patenting something that almost certainly won't get used within the lifetime of the patent.  Who has time, anyway?  And for all I know, somebody else has thought of this already, and it's full of holes.  FWIW.   -michael turner [EMAIL PROTECTED]     ----- Original Message ----- From: LARRY KLAES To: europa Sent: Tuesday, March 30, 2004 3:15 AM Subject: This won't help with the support of JIMO And you know the anti-nuke forces will not bother to differentiate between some old Soviet satellites and the new JIMO.     Science/Astronomy: * Havoc in the Heavens: Soviet-Era Satellite's Leaky Reactor's Lethal Legacy http://www.space.com/news/mystery_monday_040329.html Old Soviet nuclear powered satellites leaked a trail of menacing radioactive droplets that have become a debris threat to other spacecraft.