Jed Rothwell wrote:
I would like to know how much mass of propellant a rocket would
require to launch from earth to orbit, and from earth to Mars.
Not all that much - if you do not carry the propellant into orbit ! -
but instead adapt the power source to Bussard's nuclear ram-jet idea....
where you collect the propellant in the ionosphere.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard_ramjet
But then again - why not use the dollar resources (if they were
available) to perfect Bussard's boron/proton small ICF Fusor design -
since it is the evolution of a well-researched project already having
twenty years and thousands of man-hours of development in place - is
more robust than LENR and probably would cost less to develop to the
mulit-megawatt level anyway, and also to put into space - than any
imagineable CF powered device ?
IOW (and given that CF has many advantages for smaller home-sized -
even robot-sized power sources - so this is not intended as a put-down)
what would be the comparative advantages of LENR in this application
over warm fusion (the ICF Fusor) ?
Jones
