Orion Starship - Ablative
Launch vehicle · USA
Original archive entry. The text, images and links below are kept as they were written.
American nuclear pulse orbital launch vehicle. The ablative version of Dyson's starship would be smaller and faster then the heat sink version. It would have a mass of 100,000 tons unloaded and be equipped with 300,000 one megaton bombs.
It would accelerate in ten days to 10,000 km/sec, a velocity of 1 parsec per century. It therefore could reach Alpha Centauri in 130 years and would cost only one tenth of a GNP, or $ 150 per kilogram of payload.
Related
- Country
- USA
- Agency
- General Atomic