Crew Atomic Rockets

Alright, space cadets! This is the way it is. If your ship is bigger than a space taxi you gotta have more than one crewperson. There are lots of critical jobs (or "hats") on a spacecraft, the more hats a given crewperson wears the lower will be their job performance. They hafta sleep sometime. What kinda jobs are we lookin' at here?

Well: (ed note: the good ship Space Angel is unexpectedly on a desperate mission. At their last encounter with hostile forces, they got away but the ship took damage. They are going to set down on an unknown unexplored planet to do repairs. ) (ed note: Kelly is the newly-hired Ship's Boy.

He is barely a teenager. Lafayette is the former ship's boy, just a little older than Kelly. Lafayette is not handling the strain of the mission well.) Where your ship goes, you go. If the pilot swings the vessel into an asteroid belt and butts it up against some rook, that's where they'll find you later. There are simulators that'll start someone off, but the only way to learn to fly is to punch the board.

Oh, just look at that large silver globe scientifically packed with plenty of von Braun goodness! This little honey is from the famous Collier's Man Will Conqure Space Soon! series. We coudda had this back in the fifties, for cryin' out loud! Most of us ugly Americans have never heard of Tintin. Which is pathetic since it is one of the most popular European comics of the 20th century.

The characters might look a bit comical but the science is hard enough to bend titanium bars around. Readers in the US might not recognize the Tintin graphic novels, but everybody in Europe has read them. This nuclear powered rocket was quite well researched for the time. The main engine is apparently a NERVA style solid nuclear thermal rocket fueled with plutonium. The launch site has a breeder reactor used to cook uranium 238 into plutonium for fuel rods. The rocket lifts off and lands with an auxillary chemical rocket fueled by nitric acid and aniline, so as to prevent contaminating the ground with radiation.

The authors of the indispensable Spaceship Handbook did find one minor mistake. The astronauts lie prone on their acceleration couches, which is second best position to lying on their backs. The authors of the Spaceship Handbook suggests that this was due to Mr. Rémy misinterpreting the diagram of the Werner von Braun moonship. In that diagram, the crew members who need to monitor the chart recorder are prone, but everybody in their acceleration stations are properly on their backs. Assuming your spacecraft is not a freaking torchship, a Mars expedition with the entire spacecraft landing then lifting off is going to demand about ten times as much delta V than it has to...

This is why pretty much all NASA designed crewed Mars missions have the main spacecraft loiter in orbit while the explorers use a tiny Mars Excursion Vehicle (a "lander") to ferry them to and... A noteable exception is the Hercules single-stage reusable. The landers here assume that the planet they are visiting are wilderness worlds, that is, they do not have local starports equipped with booster rockets or anything like that. A couple of Mars expedition designs try to edge around that. They have prior unmanned missions to land robot factories utilizing the Sabatier reaction that manufacture rocket fuel from the Martian atmosphere. This wonderfully lowers the delta-V requirements.

The Lunar landers listed here will also probably work on any airless body in the solar system, with the possible exception of the planet Mercury. That planet has the dubious honor of having the highest orbital velocity of all the airless bodies. This means Mercury is the most delta-V costly world to land/lift-off from. The planets with more gravity than Mercury have an atmosphere suitable for aerobraking, providing free delta-V. The Mars landers will work on Mars, but no guarantees on them working with any other planet. Most of them require aerobraking, so they only work on planets with atmospheres.

And the planets with more gravity than Mars require more delta-V for lift-off than the landers have. Aw fer cryin' out loud! When he was making his first "Star Wars" movie George Lucas thought it would be cute to add scenes inspired by old World War 2 dogfighting movies. And ever since then sci-fi fans have lost their freaking minds. I've got new for you: in the real world combat spacecraft based on one-man fighter planes is just about the greatest military invention since the rubber spear. The concept stinks on ice scientifically, militarily, and economically.

While you are at it you might as well have your starship troopers wear bright red coats with no armor, firmly resisting the urge to take cover, and fighting out in the open in... Not like that's gonna to stop you. There are idiotic space fighter planes in both Battlestar Galacticas, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Babylon 5, Space Above And Beyond, and many many others. Not to mention the fact that it is forty freaking years after the first Star Wars movie came out and they are still making new ones jam packed with space fighters. Small, fast, highly maneuverable COMBAT SPACECRAFT. They have very limited range (never FTL), and no crew habitability to speak of; they can only operate for at most a few hours at a time.

The crew is limited to one person, or occasionally two. At least among EARTH HUMANS and ALIENS WTH FOREHEAD RIDGES, these are usually males in their early twenties, known for their swagger, coolness, and fast moves on any attractive female of an INTERBREEDABLE species. (Who REALLY ALIENS use to crew their Space Fighters is not known.) The previous section had just the bare basics of spacecraft design. This section has some of the fine details, as well as a few far-out science fictional concepts. (ed note: this is science fiction, but some of the principles are sound.

The most glaring fiction is the "traction drive" which is some kind of handwaving reactionless thruster forbidden by the laws of physics. It is described as "non-Newtonian", which is a dead giveaway that it is bogus science. Anyway that is why the described ship has no propellant tanks, which in a real spacecraft would dominate the design. In the story, Starling and her parents owns the largest momentum tether in space, and make a good living at slinging cargo all over the solar system. Unfortunately the advent of traction drive ships is going to put them out of business. So Starling's foster father Gampy wants to invest in an unconventional new type of spacecraft as a business move.)

“So, kiddo,” Gampy poked again. “Is a spaceship cost-effective?” “Yes and no. I mean, a traction drive isn’t that hard to fabricate. We could even print a couple dozen ourselves. There’s enough open-source matrices on the web, we’d only have to choose one, maybe adapt it for our needs, so it’s mostly a problem of raw materials and energy.

And we wouldn’t have any problem fabbing new solar panels, three or four racks and probably a dozen new capacitor farms, so it’s only a problem of raw materials and we can cannibalize most... I’m guessing we could do it in 24 months or less. Worst-case scenario is 48 months. If we double up on the fabbers, I bet we could cut the production time to 16 months.” Until we can get space industrialization cranked up to the point where we can actually build spacecraft in space, we will be stuck with constructing the blasted things in Terran-based factories and lofting them... Currently we have no super-high-tech delivery systems like space elevators.

So we are stuck with heavy-lift launch vehicles (HLV). These are multi-stage chemical rockets with a payload adapter on the top. The payload attaches to the adapter, and is covered by a payload fairing to protect it from being ripped to shreds by dynamic pressure and aerodynamic heating. Once the HLV has risen above the arbitrary top of the atmosphere, the payload fairing is jettisoned (SpaceX is developing a system to reuse the faring because those suckers are hideously expensive). At the correct point in the trajectory, the payload adapter releases the payload into the desired orbit. For Worldbuilding, get a copy of Architect of Worlds: Comprehensive Rules for Worldbuilding.

There is a limit to how big the payload faring can be. This naturally limits the size of the payload to whatever can be crammed into the faring. The faring size limits and the limits to the payload mass the HLV can boost means really large spacecraft will have to be lofted piecemeal by several HLVs and assembled in orbit. In quite a few NASA papers on Mars missions there are large sections talking about optimizing the spacecraft construction so it needs a few HLVs as possible. This page is for starships that travel at conventional speeds. The fact that interstellar distances are so astronomically huge means the main problem is the voyages will take many thousands of years.

And that's for the nearby stars, others will take millions of years. The main problems are that human astronauts will die of old age long before the voyage ends, and most spacecraft are not built to last that long. The starships in this page come under the headings of "Go Slow", "NAFAL" (not as fast as light) and "Apocee" (far from c). For arbitrary reasons I am defining an Apocee starship as one which cruises at a speed below 14% of the speed of light (0.14c). This is because that is the speed where the relativistic gamma factor reaches 101% (γ = 1.01). I warned you it was arbitrary.

People Also Search

• Crew - Atomic Rockets
• Deck Plans - Atomic Rockets
• Landers - Atomic Rockets
• Space Fighters - Atomic Rockets
• Advanced Design - Atomic Rockets
• Spacecraft Sizing - Atomic Rockets
• Sublight Starships - Atomic Rockets
• US-Russian crew of 3 joins the International Space Station | AP News
• For Those Wanting More Hard SF: Atomic Rockets - Reddit
• Space War Intro - Atomic Rockets