From the Enzmann Archives ca 1980
Dr. Robert
Duncan-Enzmann
 |
| On Board, Don Davis and Dr. Robert Duncan-Enzmann |
There are not just reasons, but urgent reasons for building unmanned interstellar probes and manned
starships in the immediate future. The reason for urbanizing the solar system
and concurrently opening a new age of exploration and discovery are as urgent
as were the reasons for digging individual wells in urban areas, installing
water and sewage pipes, building railways, installing urban and rural
electrification, and producing antiseptics and anesthesia for hospitals.
Many people who are alive today will be aboard starships
launched out on the long passages to neighboring stars. Manned starships are a
certainty in the very near future. In this article, the inevitability of
humankind soon voyaging to the stars is considered along with a discussion of
space technology and politics, of historic forces compelling us to star flight,
and most importantly methods of starship propulsion. Two starship engines are
discussed: the first is a relatively inexpensive, high mass-ratio nuclear pulse
engine which uses very expensive fuel. This engine has been available since
1956. The second, the Lorentzian beam engine, is a moderately expensive,
exceedingly low mass-ratio which uses fuel so cheap that production cost is
insignificant. With Lorentzian beam-propulsion, starship designs can, for the
first time, escape from the ‘tyrannical mass-ratio’ of 1000 tons of fuel plus
reaction mass being required for each ton of ship and each ton of cargo. For
example, a 10,000 ton ship (plus payload) driven by a nuclear pulse propulsion
would require 10,000,000 tons of fuel, plus reaction exhaust mass. A 10,000 ton
ship (plus payload) driven by the Lorentzian beam engine could manage with
somewhere between 50,000 to as low as 10,000 tons of fuel plus reaction mass,
and in theory even lower mass-ratios are quite feasible.
It is explained herein how and why mankind has, to date,
gained $20 for each $1 invested in space efforts within the Solar system. The
20-to-1 gains are inflation-adjusted and interested-adjusted profits. It is explained
why profits from interstellar expeditions will return profit multiples of at
least $10,000 dollars returned for each $1 spent on initial design,
development, and first launches. What is really being said is:
“The gains which may be expected from interstellar
exploration, colonization, and research are so great that they are really only
comparable with revolutions such as mankind’s use of artificial shelter,
clothing, fire, the wheel, and fusion energy.”
Even this comparison
may be inappropriate; mankind’s colonization of interstellar space is better
compared with the emergence of life from the waters of the Earth’s oceans to
colonize the waterless expanses of the continents. Where would we be if all
life forms had waited until the social and ecological problems of the oceans
were solved before they despoiled the continents! In this article, techniques
long available but never before disclosed, will be published.
Current technology
The technology to build starships exists now, and in fact
has existed for the past 30 – 40 years. Knowledge of this technology has been
withheld from most of the public and even much of the engineering community for
decades. This has been done by classification, and a news media in the United
States which is implacably hostile to technology in general. This attitude of
the media, and a politically powerful segment of the so-called academic
community, has literally frozen aeronautical progress in the United States for
nigh unto 32 years.
An effort to build starships would, in ten to fifteen years,
place expeditions with men, women, and
children aboard, on landfalls near a
half a dozen of the Sun’s closest neighbors.
Consequences
In the immediate future – 1985-1995 – such an effort would
generate a technological economic, social, and moral boom of global extent,
raising standards of living in the USA by 200 - 300% and over the globe by a
minimum of 50 - 100%. Few of us remember what life was like in the American
south from the 1930s to the early 1950s. How skimpy the media was granting
credit to Kennedy’s Apollo project for its spending on roads, supermarkets, furniture,
housing, radios, television sets, schools, automobiles, and the other material
things of life. Contrary to popular belief, the 20 billion or so dollars that were
invested did not fly away to the Moon, eventually perishing as space junk. It
was spent on ourselves, and then a few tons of metal carried the hearts of the
nation to the Moon.
Attempts to Prevent it
How sad is the story of Project Apollo as originally planned
compared with what was finally permitted. In brief: lower stages could have
been collected in Erath orbit from both the Gemini and Apollo flights. Had this
been done, we would today have a great national space station orbiting Earth.
Upper stages and used LEMs (lunar excursion modules) could have been collected
in Lunar orbit. This was not done. It was not done because great pressure was brought
to bear by the academic community and media to prevent all and any moves toward
the building of such stations. Lower stages were deliberately destroyed by
hurling them into the earth’s atmosphere. Upper stages and the LEMs were hurled
into solar orbit or back to the Moon, wasting precious fuel, oxygen, food, and
potential living space which could have served as a point of refuge for later expeditions.
Who Will Profit
Yet, the common average persons, the Archi Bunkers of the
world, the working engineers, the housewives, always have and always will manage
to force technological progress to occur. Sooner rather than later the media and
savants of the academic community will be dragged kicking and screaming into
stellar exploration, even as they were forced into the space age by the
economic horse-sense of this community of persons.
Consequences of Doing it
This article is designed to briefly tell the public just how
close we are to a new age of discovery and exploration; to convey how this
effort will open a cornucopia of technological plenty in a super clean
environment for all of humankind and how modest the required investment will
be. The writer will first demonstrate the simplicity and general availability
of technology with which starships can be built, and consider the cost.
Early Plans for Interstellar Probes
Efforts toward launching an unmanned interstellar probe by
1980 to the Sun’s nearest neighbors, the triplet suns of the Proxima Centauri System,
were well underway by the 1950s. Plans were not ad hoc. They were carefully
couched in a overall plan to gradually expand humankind’s research within the
solar system, around the solar system, and thence out of the solar system. In
all phases, applications were to follow the first research and exploration
probes. In all cases the Grand Plan was itself subordinate and always a small
part of a much larger global plan to quickly improve the health, education, and
living standards of as many people on Earth as possible… and not just towards
interstellar flight per se. Unfortunately, when the so-called high
technologists speak thus, the talk is always received with feigned derisive
shock and sneering distaste by the liberal wine-and-cheese set, the so-called
humanistic scientific community. I beg the reader to consider a single lengthy
footnote included at the end of this article – The North American Hydroelectric Project.
Lunar Rovers and Economics
The writer took advantage of an opportunity to cross the
Greenland Ice Cap. It is strange that no proper accounts seem to be in print
concerning the modus operendi of such crossings. Frankly stated: we
started with between 70 – 300 dogs,
depending on the number of men in the crossing. We ended the expeditions with
perhaps 10 to 30 dogs. The missing dogs were used to nourish the stronger
animals.
During the Apollo program the writer suggested – and
seriously – that dogs in space suits would be far cheaper and far more
effective Lunar Rovers than the mechanical devices finally settled on. Ranges
open to exploration would have been much greater. Costs would have been lower.
The flesh-and-blood rovers would have been left on the Moon. Alas, in spite of
all the writer’s efforts to persuade NASA that these would be magnificent
freeze-dried monuments to mans’ best friend, NASA rejected the concept on
humane grounds. Yet, how many of the readers have seen (as the writer has) what
happens to mans’ best friend in medical schools all over the world at the
annual sacrifice to vivisection! I looked sadly at the poor would-be rovers
being dragged by ropes around their necks into surgery, commenting to my
partner: “That is the only species of animal life that trusts humankind and is
a real friend to us. There is a lot to be learned here besides medicine.”
Nuclear Powered Rockets
Basic to the goal of launching of an unmanned interstellar
probed by about 1980 was the Orion nuclear pulse rocket. Such vehicles could,
in the late 1960s, have carried 80-person expeditions to Mars in one week, stopped
there for a day, a week, or even months. They had sufficient power to be
independent of the narrow launch windows we follow today as tortuously as the
Spanish followed the Trade Winds in the 1600s. They could have returned with 10
tons of samples after another seven days of flight. The same vehicles could have carried a 20-person
expedition to Pluto (about eight light hours distant) in three weeks, stopped
for a week, returning with two tons of samples in a twenty-one day return
passage. The lengths of time spent by the Pioneer, Marine, and Voyager probes
are absurdities compared to the possibilities that were and are still open to
engineers.
The engineering community was fully confident in 1958 and
1959 that men would land on most of the bodies of the solar system well before
1990 and certainly before 2000. Orion space ships were built and test flow in the
late 1950s by the US Air Force. They were powered with charges of conventional
explosives in order not to contaminate the atmosphere. In space, the Orion
vehicles would have been driven by tiny nuclear bomblets. The nuclear pulse
engine was tested successfully in an enclosed static rack in the late 1950s
with complete success, exceeding all specifications.
Note: the Orion, Nerva, the larger nuclear snap reactors, and ion drives were cancelled about 1960, dismantled for scrap, and have not been discussed or mentioned by the media since.
Note: the early Orion nuclear pulse propulsion engines were tested apart from the airframes and found not only excellent but significantly better than called for in the designs. Project Orion was totally scrapped in 1950. Discussion of it is still under media black-list moratorium. The writer and numbers of other engineers were told in no uncertain terms to be quiet or else. The threats and admonitions were not due to any issue of national security, but from a very powerful fraction of the so-called and self-nominated liberal scientific community. Project Orion has scarcely been heard of since.
It is all too easy to jeer and make fun of technologies
achievements; however in human history the years about WW I and WW II are
notable for the enormously expanded technology, improved health, better
nutrition, universal suffrage, general education, soaring productivity per
capita, and particularly for the expansion of scientific information.
Interesting and notorious examples include: the Mount Paloma telescope, the
Krupp family’s Big Bertha aeroplane, the eradication of smallpox, V-2 nuclear
fission bombs and then power plants, then, quite suddenly, the first manned
space flights. It was in the 1940s that interstellar flight became a
technological possibility. The dream of star-flight fired the imaginations of scientists
everywhere and burned in the hearts of many others. In this article, designs of
the 1950s for starship engines will be considered, together with the startling
not yet published designs of the 1970s.
How much we owe the early pioneers, scientists,
industrialists, and philanthropists. I knew a few of them personally – Charles Lindbergh
landed his plane on the white sandy beach in front of our lonely isolated home
in Maine which was situated close to the home of future Senator Margaret Chase
Smith. Lindbergh stayed with us for several nights. I have handmade maps, made
by the father of the Red Barron, elder von Richthofen, who did so much to
establish the geology of China and dreamed of airlines across Siberia. Goddard
I also knew when I was young. In hours, this open, helpful man educated a
little boy in rocketry. One of the dearest to my heart was old Grandpa
Guggenheim – why doesn’t the media give him credit? He is the man who financed
so much of Lindbergh’s epic flight. It was Guggenheim who financed most of Dr.
Goddard’s research, which swept America, Germany, and then the world into the
space age.
The first technology which could have been used to build
starships – at great expense – was developed in the early 1950s with the
fabrication of atomic (fission) bombs smaller than the end of your little
finger. The objective was to shrink atomic bombs so they could be fired from
six-inch, or even smaller caliber artillery pieces. Following this invention they
designed such equipment as atomic powered locomotives and even large military tanks,
which hopefully would be able to range 50,000 miles or more without refueling.
They would carry quantities of shells and each would have warheads with
explosive powers of perhaps 100 tons of dynamite. Indeed an attractive system
for military men of WW II vintage, who at best had to refuel their tanks every
20 – 30 miles.
Now going back in time, consider the first successful
internal combustion engine. It was built by French ironmongers, manufacturers
of muzzle-loading cannons. They placed a piston in a small cannon, linked the
piston to a crankshaft and tried to operate it with gunpowder, and finally
succeeded in operating it (and propelling a ferry boat) using saffron pollen as
fuel.
The cars we drive are simple heat-engines derived from the
cannon. Basically they include the cannons (cylinders), projectiles (pistons),
coupling devices (crankshaft), and usually a flywheel and regulatory
mechanisms. The Orion Nuclear Pulse rocket is a one cylinder engine. The micro
atomic bombs are shaped-charge explosives (this is the first time this has been
printed); the ‘potbellied stove’ reactor became a simple plate. It reached
temperatures of 100,000,000ok for 1/1,000,000 of a second – once per
second – resulting in average pusher-plate temperatures of about 10oc
in space.
It is instructive to consider these two technologies in the
context of how humankind’s scientific knowledge, his technological society, as
well as global levels of health education, standards of living, dreams of cheap
unlimited fusion power, and manned interstellar flight developed concurrently.
It is instructive because even the possibility, much less the near future
certainty, of manned starships voyaging into to a new physical frontier is a new
dream of humankind’s. Serious efforts to design and test these technologies are
very recent.
The quest for real physical frontiers stirs ceaselessly in
the souls of men. No group of humans, animals, or even microorganisms has ever
– except with forked tongue in both cheeks – seriously devoted energy to
solving all local problems before
allowing migration out of the local ‘neighborhood,’ or required total
understanding of the ramifications of a technical innovation before permitting application
of said new technology. New physical frontiers are organic necessities. As Earl
Hubbard so succinctly phrased it: “If humankind is forbidden to venture out into
interstellar space, the consequences are not expanded freedom, justice, and a
wholesome clean environment. The consequences are threefold: dictatorship,
devolution, and death.”
Let us consider frontiers and the development of technology:
the beautiful earthly frontiers of the American golden West, Australia,
Manchuria, Africa, and elsewhere dwindled swiftly in the 1800s. Woodsmen swept
away forests. The iron horse locomotive carried products to the growing cities,
along with human families, who forever talked of and longed for ‘the country’. At
that time a few scientists visualized space travel, and the very first science
fiction appeared.
In the sunny prosperous days of the very late 1800s and
early 1900s the vast forests of the earth’s temperate zones were at last
beaten. Lumberjacks skinned Massachusetts and much of Europe as bald as Astroturf.
Multitudes thronged into the cities, over which carpets of electric lights
flickered on. Telescopes and artillery improved. A global middle class emerged;
in America their heartfelt longing for the country and a physical frontier was
constrained to vacations reading Zane Grey and other escape literature, and
occasionally science fiction. Many more scientists considered space travel
within the solar system, yet so little was known. The principles which would
make interplanetary flight possible were just conceptions; the technology did
not exist. The principles for flights to the stars were not known. The haunting
promise of travel to the planets still lay somewhere between fantasy and
conceivable, but with very distant technology indeed.
The Aquarians Strike Back
The effort was to industrialize the entire globe in a
generation, then to ride on the crest of enormously expanded wealth (best
measured in the average person’s capital in terms of health, nutrition,
education, housing, leisure, entertainment, utilities, and appliances), and then
cause ever-more efficient and productive technology to flow outward into humankind’s
manifest destiny. It should never be forgotten that when wealth reaches the
average man (middle class and blue collar workers, not the elite), the new
wealth of the middle class automatically creates yet more wealth. This inevitably
forces the development of even more advanced systems. One of the most
compelling developments will be the opening of a real physical frontier into
which humankind will be able to migrate. That frontier is interstellar space.
The effort to take humankind to the stars, so
enthusiastically worked on in the 1950s, ended in the anguish of cancellations,
engineering and research moratoriums, and media distortions and black listings
of the 1960s and 1970s. The concept of universal industrialization was scrapped
in a catastrophic ban on all new systems development until “all social problems
are solved”. This monstrous situation, compounded by promises to dismantle
large fractions of the American industrial base, was epitomized by two recent
movements: Carter’s election platform promising to dismantle the national
capacity to generate power with nuclear reactors, and the Carter government’s
laws suits against businesses and universities on the grounds that their
attempts to develop new tomatoes and mechanical tomato pickers was a crime
against farm labor. The 1960s and 1970s were a generation of technological
repression in the United States, continuing to this day. This was done by the
Liberal community who orchestrated the communications media, hunted out creative
engineers to destroy their careers, and cancelled programs which would have
raised the standard of living. They stifled, falsified, or misdirected
research, wasted resources, debased the currency, and antagonized much of the
world. This same liberal community has been implacably hostile toward cheap
food production, cheap power production, and basic education for the masses –
particularly the teaching of science, history, and geography.
Human progress continues in spite of the liberal community,
which has done its best to stifle it with their catastrophic moratoriums all
new system development. This they did in the name of ‘solving all social
problems before trying to compound the complexities of our civilization’, but
in reality, they are implacably hostile to anything which might really uplift
and improve the lot of the average human being anywhere.
These improvements to the lot of common persons would have
been attained quickly by pushing at top speed the development of a
postindustrial society, by furthering all phases of high technology, by using
the developed and developing high technology as a super, universal, and
worldwide school where people could learn, and by applying new technologies to develop
the state of all arts.
High technology, resulting in a postindustrial society,
urbanization of the solar system, and interstellar expeditions, was one part of
the plan. Appropriate technology – how abused this term has become – was to be
followed step by step by all people, or even several steps at a time whenever
possible, to produce ever higher standards of living globally. Appropriate
technology was well understood by the Chinese; it is what abolished famine in
China, converting it into a nation with a food surplus. China is now swiftly
moving to total industrialization with attendant high standards of living.
Appropriate technology has, as recently as 1975, changed India into a country
that can feed itself. Appropriate technology is that which can be applied to a
problem at once, with a profit. It isn’t a cul-de-sack or an end in itself.
Appropriate technology is a step along a stair case, and delightfully, some
like to run up the staircase many steps at a time – perhaps even try a Great
Leap Forward!
Now I will direct this article to the specifics of
technology being developed to urbanize the solar system. The reader must not
regard the word urbanize as ugly;
urbanization can give rise to structures of fairy-like beauty. The momentum
generated through the efforts to develop the solar system will carry some
persons on to the vast limitless reaches of interstellar space long before the
solar system has been completely explored. The momentum generated through our
ever growing technological capabilities will carry humankind to ever-higher
plateaus. Some people will rest there. Others will invent and partake in
expansions, which in the not too distant future of the history of our species, will
parallel the departure of the lung fish from the shallow Appalachian Oceans for
the land.
The growth of human society and betterment of the lot of
individuals is never a consequence of natural limitations. Limitations on
growth and improvement of individual standards such as good health, nutrition,
comfort, leisure, entertainment, happiness, and new frontiers, are not natural.
Limitations on the above are imposed upon society by people, not by the natural
environment.
Such people-imposed limitations always have more or less
vicious results. In light of this, it is now useful to review technological
progress under the political constraints placed upon it over the past 25 years:
It may come as a surprise, in an article concerning the construction of manned
starships, to read what follows, but the priorities of the Grand Planners in
the late 1940s and early 1950s were not ad-hoc, limited to the construction of
starships. The plans were technologically well conceived, methodically paced,
and scientifically sound. Priorities of the Grand Planners were always directed
toward the following objectives, essentially in the order listed below, to be
accomplished as soon as possible, for as many people as possible; the view is
that the only real resource is human
beings, and that as far as we are capable of knowing anything, man is the
measure of all things. The ideal results would be:
Health
– freedom from pathological ill-health
Nutrition
– universal, good, adequate, pleasant nutrition
Education
– universal availability, compulsory for minors
Basics
– clothing, shelter, heat, furnishings, from public welfare if needed
Employment
– meaningful, it is criminal to waste a person’s life
Frontiers
– for all and any person or group to develop, here on Earth or in space; people
need frontiers be these religious, scientific, service, artistic, or physical
frontiers
The above were to be attained through:
1)
improved access roads in very primitive countries, nets of superhighways,
pipelines, super-trains, and super electric power grids in advanced countries.
2)
production of food surpluses in all countries (China, India, Indonesia,
Philippines, Taiwan, Mexico, and all of North Africa have attained and passed
this level since 1950) further mechanizing factory farms, making them even less
labor intensive in advanced countries.
3) accelerating
the decrease in the cost of power, which had been declining since 1850 by
immediate construction of continental hydroelectric projects across the globe,
development of international fission power plants immediately, standardizing
power frequencies and completing continental electric grids, developing fusion
power plants in an all-out international crash program.
Early Designs of Interstellar Probes
In the late 1950s it was estimated that about 100 billion
1958 dollars would suffice to research, develop, build, and launch the first
manned interstellar expedition. It could have carried perhaps 250 people to a
depth of 5-209 light years from Earth at 20-35% of the velocity of light. It
was thought that the subsequent manned expeditions would cost on the order of
2-10 billion 1958 dollars each. Today the technology to build relatively cheap
starships is tantalizing close. Before comparing these two approaches to the
construction of starship engines, it is revealing to consider the dismal
stifling of technology by politics in the United States between 1958 and 1980.
Feasibility and hardware studies of launching unmanned interstellar
probes had started in the 1950s. First a reconnaissance probe was panned, to
fly-by the Proxima Centauri triplet at 95% the speed of light. This was a 10-12
year project, 1980-1992. The second step was an explorer probe, designed to
trifurcate and place 50-inch telescopes in orbit about these stars and retinue
of planets, self-program studies, then return the data to Earth. This was a 12-20
year project, to happen about 1985-2005. The third and last step was
realization of the Grand Design, which projected a launch of manned starships
between 1990-2005. Yes, even then we dared to dream, plan, and work toward a
one-way manned expedition.
Note: It should
be remembered that in the middle 1950s the liberal scientific community was
shrieking with protest that an expedition to the Moon would be impossible for
centuries because: reentry was impossible, mass ratios would have to be between
10 and 100 billion to one, that astronauts would disappear in 20 miles of moon-dust,
that we should be curing cancer and clearing slums, and so on and on and on and
on.
Nuclear Hydrogen Rockets, Ion Drives, and Auxiliary Power
Nerva was a very high ISP rocket constructed and
static-tested in New Mexico. It would have enormously expanded the capabilities
of the United States efforts in both unmanned and manned planetary exploration.
It would for example, have made it possible to land persons on Mars, Mercury
and some of the asteroids, and fly-by Venus. Together with the Nerva rocket, large
very high power nuclear SNAP reactors were designed, constructed, and tested.
Sadly, the Nerva rockets have been dismantled, the SNAP reactors junked,
research on ion drives stopped, and a general moratorium on all research in
these directions imposed; in effect, no significant research or even plans to
research in this direction exists in the United States of 1980.
Nuclear Pulse Propulsion
In the foregoing paragraphs there has been some lamenting
over the mass ratio of: 1000 tons of fuel + reaction mass being needed to move each
ton to the area of a star near the Sun. In truth, the attainment of a mass
ratio of 1000/1 was in itself a great achievement. Even the best combinations
of chemical energy sources and/or nuclear powered ion drives would have
demanded mass ratios in the order of 1,000,000/1 to attain even 5% of the
velocity of light. The 1000/1 mass ratio was achieved by Orion Class Nuclear
Pulse rockets.
To the best of the writer’s knowledge, Nuclear Pulse
Propulsion was invented by Dr. Stanislaw Ulam as a consequence of his work
developing atomic fission bombs. Over the past 30 years, engines for propelling
vehicles to stars near the Sun have centered around two designs. First, Nuclear
Pulse propulsion, which is known to a limited public. Orion rockets were built
and test-flown with chemical pulses. Orion rockets were static bench-tested
using nuclear pulses. The Orion K rockets were cut up for scrap about 1960 and
a moratorium was imposed on all discussion in technical journals. It stands to
this day. Now, over 22 years after the first Orion was test flown, nuclear
pulse propulsion is rarely mentioned in the nontechnical media except to
ridicule, abuse, demean, or grossly distort the cost, safety, and truly
incredible capabilities of this engine. The second technique for interstellar
propulsion was the Lorentzian Beam Propulsion. To the best knowledge of the
writer, this has never previously been discussed in either a technical or
non-technical publication. The writer developed a design for Lorentzian Beam
Propulsion, subsequent to his work on thermonuclear fusion, which could have
had application to fusion bombs and triggers. The work was cancelled and the
direction of research stopped; however, it has reemerged in a most surprising
and timely fashion, which will certainly insure its development in the very
near future. (editor’s note: the writer does not indicate what that is.)
Manned Space Effort with Chemical Propulsion
The manned space effort has included Mercury, Gemini,
Apollo, and the Space Shuttle. Publically touted as a great success, in reality
it is a bitterly truncated and politically dragged out technology. The
successes are a tribute to the engineering community, the bitter disappointments
are almost entirely due to political interference. The objectives of the Apollo
Project were really fourfold: 1-land men on the moon. 2 - establish a permanent
station on the surface of the Moon. 3 - establish a space station permanently
orbiting the Moon. 4 - establish a space station permanently orbiting the
Earth.
Six groups of men were landed on the Moon. Eleven expeditions
made it to the vicinity of the Moon. No one was allowed to say so, but the
desire to gather used rocket stages in Earth orbit and 3rd stages
plus LEMS in Lunar orbit to use in the building of a large space station would
have been easy. Potential living space, residual supplies, materials, and fuel
could now be waiting in Earth orbit, Lunar orbit, and on the surface of the
Moon.
The Apollo series was the only part of the Grand Design to Build
Starships that survived. The project was visualized as a chemical forerunner, a
means of gaining experience in space before the first generations of chemically
powered aerospace planes were built. These were to be followed in turn by
nuclear powered aerospace planes that could take off from any major airport and
thence into orbit.
The Space Shuttle has barely survived in a reduced form.
Construction of large booster rockets such as the Saturn series is no longer
possible in the United States; the factories have been dismantled and no
replacements are even planned. The USA could not today, nor for some years in
the future, send a manned expedition to the Moon or even put a space lab into
orbit. The USA was at sword point with the French, crushed the Germans, forced
Japan to tread on eggs, and compelled other nations to follow our party line.
The Greater Apollo Project, Manned Expeditions, Operations on the Moon
The astonishingly successful parts of the Apollo Project
carried out in the 1960s and early 1970s as seen by the public were but a part
of the Greater Apollo Project. The Greater Apollo Project was directed toward
realizing the following three goals in addition to landing men on the Moon:
1)
Upper stages of the Saturn system were to be gathered in Earth Orbit, coupled
together, and built into a permanent space station. The cost would have been
minimal.
2)
Some Apollo third stages were to be collected in Lunar orbit to become the
elements of a permanent station orbiting the Moon. All LEMS were to be
collected at the same station to add their residual supplies to its growth.
3)
Several third stages were to be landed on surface of the Moon, to establish
the beginnings of a permanent Lunar base.
Three to five additional trips, or redirection of two or
three of the trips undertaken, would have sufficed to very roughly but usefully
fabricate a space station orbiting the Earth permanently, a space station
orbiting the Moon, and a station on the surface of the Moon. All would have
been crude but usable, and expandable by later expeditions.
Note: the
liberal scientific community, finally dragged, kicking and screaming protest
every inch of the way into the space age, now devoted every effort toward
making sure that none of the above was even attempted. Third stages were hurled
into solar orbit, Lunar excursion modules were hurled into the moon to ‘generate
seismic waves’, and lower stages were retro-rocketed into the oceans. And the
talk was of a moratorium on any efforts in space for a half century or so.
Finally the Apollo application programs were totally cancelled. A pity, when
one to three expeditions would have sufficed to construct both a permanent
lunar orbital station and a surprising large station on the surface of the moon.
Really very little extra effort when we recall that five groups have since landed
on the surface of the moon and ten manned expeditions have been in the vicinity
of the moon.
Supersonic, Hyper-altitude, and Hypersonic Airframes
The continually expanding capabilities of aircraft since
Kitty Hawk follow logical steps. These include reciprocating engines, jets,
ram-jests, ANP (aircraft nuclear propulsion), and rockets. The airframes also
grew in logical steps. The Germans, for example, were ready in 1944-1945 with
intercontinental jet bombers and exospheric skip-glide missiles. It was
visualized as a test bed from which designs for supersonic, hypersonic, and
finally airport-to-orbit flights would evolve.
Airport to Earth Orbit Aerospace Craft
Lifting hundreds of tons and eventually multi-thousand ton
payloads into Earth orbit at low prices has been and still is a major obstacle
to an expanded space effort. On paper, it is apparent that if a system were
available it would be significantly cheaper in ergs of energy expended, to
transfer cargos from point to point along ballistic trajectories instead of
struggling over the inhospitable oceans or through the atmosphere with
aircraft. In the late 1940s engineers were really teased with how few kilowatts
it should take to hoist a ton into Earth orbit. The ideal answer seemed to be
the nuclear (ANP) aerospace plane. Such craft would be able to depart from any
airport, then quickly and cheaply attain low Earth orbit.
Winged Spacecraft
Unfortunately, the design of advanced airframes has been
under a moratorium in the USA for over 20 years. The Boeing supersonic airplane
was cancelled at a greater cost than the price of completion. The Japanese
attempt to purchase the project was curtly rebuffed with economic threats. The
Anglo-French SST was beset by American threats, pressures, and a variety of
economic sanctions. The Dyna-Soar (dynamic soar) airplane was cancelled and scrapped.
Advanced hypersonic military aircraft have not been built, nor are they
researched or designed. Opposition to the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo series as a dead-end
in airframes was used as an excuse to swiftly discontinue airframe research.
Nothing really new in the way of civil or military aircraft has evolved in the
USA for over 20 years, nor is anything planned – with exception of the Boeing
747.
Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion (ANP)
The incredible potential of nuclear propulsion for aircraft
was grasped by every aerospace firm in the world, even as PM-3A was evolving on
the drawing boards. It was well understood in the late 1940s that vehicles the
size of a Boeing 747 or a C-5 would ideally be powered by nuclear engines, rather
than by burning hydrocarbons. The benefits would have included unlimited range,
a huge increase in cargo carrying capacities, incredible reduction of fuel
costs, great reductions in airport fire hazards – a God-sent release from the
ever-present fire hazard that has cost thousands upon thousands of lives in
agonizing aircraft fires. It promised an end to the noxious pollution that
large numbers of large aircraft can generate, and a global economic boon in
travel and cargo shipments.
Understand this, a number of ANP engines were designed,
built, and finally test operated in the late 1950s. These included a number of ‘flights’
with the reactors developing full power, but not propelling the aircraft. The
writer sat on one such engine when it was at full power, receiving less
radiation than from the K40 (potassium 40) in the bloodstream of the
person sitting next to him. The ANP nuclear engines were designed and packaged
to generate less radiation than the natural cosmic background. They were also packaged
to free-fall 1000,000 feet onto solid rock without bursting. It was intended
that these engines would be used in subsonic craft, then in supersonic craft,
and finally hypersonic passenger-carrying aircraft. The hypersonic, suborbital
aircraft are natural developments in generations of aircraft because they save
the passengers time, and they save energy by not beating their way through
endless thousands of miles of atmosphere. Almost all the energy they consume is
used for the task of transferring loads from point A to point B.
Sadly, aircraft nuclear propulsion research was totally stopped
about 1960, the engines were dismantled for scrap. There is a moratorium on any
research whatsoever in this direction, and since then the subject is not
mentioned, much less discussed in the media.
Portable High Energy Nuclear Reactors
What is said in these next four paragraphs about small
portable nuclear power plants may seem quite surprising, even astonishing. It
is history, and gives perspective to everything that follows. Very simply,
power plants which could drive vehicles to the stars were constructed in the
early 1950s.
The PM-3A
 |
| McMurdo Sound |
The American PM-3A nuclear reactor provided heat, power, and
light for the U.S. Antarctic base at McMurdo Sound. Its electrical generating
capacity was 1.6 to 2.0 megawatts, over a lifespan of at least 20 years. A
Boeing 747 or USAF C-5 could transport it, with all shielding and auxiliary
equipment. PM-3A operated from 1964 to 1972 without accident or difficulty. Yet,
it was decommissioned and scrapped twelve years ahead of schedule as ‘a
possible explosive’, ‘genetic hazard’, ‘threat to the natural Antarctic
environment’, and for not being cost effective. Today, the cost of diesel
engines, storage facilities, fuel-preheat equipment, special heated pipelines,
and the agonized logistics of dragging fuel to the Antarctic have ballooned
costs upwards of 50-300 times the cost of letting nuclear reactor PM-3A
continue in operation. Furthermore, all other operations about McMurdo Sound
are constrained by the crushing logistics burden, while the radioactivity from
burning the hydrocarbon fuels exceeds that of PM-3A. In addition, there has
been a moratorium lasting almost 20 years on construction, research, or even
discussion of advanced portable nuclear power plants. Demonstration plants and
pilot plants started or existing were dismantled.
Using the energy potential of the primitive PM-3A, designed
over 25 years ago, for propulsion of a spacecraft is a tantalizing engineering
problem. This ancient power plant had the capacity in the 1960s, but did a
means of propulsion exist? Was there a way of applying the energy such that it
would accelerate a vehicle against the inertial continuum, without paying a
penalty of carrying 1000,000 tons of fuel (plus reaction mass) for each 100
tons of vehicle plus payload? Yes, there were two ways. It is revealing to
estimate the propulsion that might be accomplished if the ancient PM-3A’s
energy could be applied:
(1.6 MW) (746 watts/HP) (550 ft. lbs./HP) / (32 ft. / sec2)
(2000 lbs/ton) = 200 tons at 1G (gravity; that is to say a 200 ton mass could
be accelerated at 1G against the inertial continuum.) It is fascinating to
think that this early primitive reactor could have produced sufficient
electrical energy to accelerate a 200 ton vehicle to about 70,000 miles per
second in perhaps 10 weeks, or a 1000 ton vehicle to a speed of about 14,000
miles per second in the same amount of time. It is useful to remember that if
the 1000-to-1 ration must be observed, the reactor could accelerate its vehicle
to speeds maximizing at about 36,000 miles per second after 10 years of
acceleration, then it would have to decelerate for the next ten years.
One of humankind’s Grand Designs is now so close to
realization and so appropriate, that almost everyone now alive will enjoy the
prosperity generated by clean, cheap, and unlimited fusion power. (The editor
notes that Bussard’s fission-fusion Pollywell portable reactor is being built
in 2017, which will make cheap, clean energy available to even third-world
countries, raising the standard of living world-wide.) Starships will be
built almost at the moment fusion reactors commence producing electricity
commercially. Most importantly this article is the first publication discussing
engines for starship propulsion which are not bitterly constrained by the
classical rule that 1000 tons of fuel and reaction mass are required to deliver
one ton of payload to a neighboring star. This article is about starships being
mass-produced to carry brave men, women, children, and that older people will
share their wisdom and experience with fellow colonists setting forth on the
Long, Long Passage.
Footnote: The North American Hydroelectric Project
The writer feels compelled to add this note for two reasons.
First, to briefly outline one of the bitterest disappointments which the North
American Engineering community suffered in the last 25 years, one which was
also a heavy personal disappointment.
The North American Hydroelectric Project was inspired after
WW II when our engineers saw that the Norwegians had harnessed water power, and
used it in industry to electrify railways, and to produce power for light and
heat. The effect in Norway, one of the poorest countries on the globe (below
even Bangladesh in resources until the discover of North Sea Oils), was
stunning. The standard of living shot up. Health improved, the environment was
vastly cleaner. The improved cleanliness around train depos and industries is
something that anyone who has traveled in the filthy, coal burning trains of
Continental Europe and England will appreciate.
The Norwegian hydroelectric project was an inspiration to
every engineer who saw it. Particularly inspiring was the wonder of heating
homes electrically. We hoped that this would soon be a possibility in all
nations of the Earth; we furthermore hoped that North America could expand on
the Scandinavian example by lighting highways as well as heating almost all
dwelling places electrically. We came, we saw, we went to work.
The NAHP would have quadrupled production of electricity in
Canada, the USA, and Mexico, and doubled the area that could be farmed. It
would have provided beautiful inland waterways for the transport of goods – a
logical descendant of the canal systems of the 1800s.
Russia saw and went to work immediately. Look at a map of
European Russia and Siberia of today. The new lakes, hydroelectric plants,
expanded farmlands, and ameliorated weather are a tribute to what can be done.
It is not often mention in the American-controlled information media, but you
can now take trips on ocean liner-like vehicles across both European Russia and
most of Siberia.
India saw and went to work. Just three years ago they solved
their food problem by manipulation
of their hydroelectric irrigation system. India, even as China, can now feed
itself. How this must confound the Black Guelph, which so fondly predicted mass
global starvation by the mid-1970s for most of humanity.
Africa
and South America saw and went to work. Their success has been great, albeit
projects are only in the initial stages.
How
shameful it is; North America did not go to work.
This article was discovered in the Enzmann Archives,
written approximately 1980. Edited by Michelle Snyder, published by White
Knight Studio with permission.
Dr. Robert Duncan-Enzmann,
designer of the Enzmann Starship
physicist,
scientist, astronomer, geologist, archaeologist, historian,
linguist, medical doctor
British Embassy School,
Peking, China; Univ. London; WW II USN, AC; RN, AB Harvard; ScB Hon.,
London; Standard, MSc, Witwatersrand; Nat Sci Scholar; MIT course work; Royal
Inst. Uppsala Swed.; PhD/MD Cuidad Juarez, Mex.; Pacific Radar:
Greenland Gap-filler, Canada DEW-line; SAGE; Pacific PRESS;
California ATLAS, BMEWS; ICBM; Kwajalein Atoll ICBM intercept; TRADEX;
Mars Voyager; Cryptography.
