Would nuclear pulse propulsion be in any way practical or feasible?

[Fanghur]

Does anyone know whether nuclear pulse propulsion, that is, using atomic bombs to propel a starship through space, would be anything approaching being practical? I mean, I've heard it said that we could theoretically build such a space ship with current technology, but I recently saw a documentary that said that in order to get up to speed using nuclear pulse propulsion, you would have to detonate a nuclear bomb behind the ship once every 3 seconds for days at a time. That works out to hundreds of thousands of nuclear bombs, which seems ridiculously impractical to me. Where the heck would you store them?

 

Am I overlooking something here? Or is nuclear pulse propulsion really as impractical as I now think it is?

[swansont]

Project Orion

[Tim the plumber]

I once did a design for a SF alien space ship on such an idea.

 

I was proposing using a laser system to fire at small spheres of H₂ or H₃ and detonate a thermo-nuke. The power for the laser came from the blast plate being driven into the body of the space ship with a "shank" of a pillar going through a magnetic induction coil to provide the necessary shock absorbing cushon. The same system was used to shoot the blast plate/shank back away from the space ship before the next nuke was detonated. The blast plate was fired back slower than it came in so some energy could be harvested from the cycle.

 

The funny thing was that since the first firing would not have charged lasers this needed a fission nuke which was secured under a lock and key system. Starting the enginers involved turning the key and geting the lasers to warm up, just like a petrol car....

 

That ship I guessed at 20,000 tonnes. Whilst it could have landed on a planet the planet would not have liked the experience.

 

The "death star" version had a central chamber in which a fusion blast was ignited by laser and the resulting high velocity plasma was split into positive and negitive charged streams. These charged streams were harvested for power. Thrust was caused by not using the plasma from one side of the explosion.

 

I hope we never see such things it's a grusome way to travel.

[Enthalpy]

Nuclear pulse propulsion is as unfeasible as you imagine, yes.

 

More feasible, but nothing desireable to my eyes, would be radioactivity. Coat big (seriously big) light panels with a really thin alpha emitter, so that alpha particles and decay atoms can exit the layer freely, and you get half the decay recoil. The energy density is similar to nuclear fission, though not quite as high. And of course, it's dirty.