Customer Reviews

The Nuclear Rocket: Making Our Planet Green, Peaceful and Prosperous (Apogee Books Space Series)

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Mea culpa! I must apologize to those who buy "The Nuclear Rocket." In writing it, I had a senior moment and completely forgot a crucial point in my argument that a cocoon (or wrapper, enclosure or whatever you call it) can be developed to contain a nuclear rocket engine and its radioactive materials during its launch to and return from LEO. I speak of the Titan II accident in Arkansas in 1980. I knew about it, as I was in the nuclear weapons program at the time, but I simply didn't remember it until about a month ago when I sat bolt upright in bed at 2:00 am.

Let me summarize what I should have included.

The Mark-6 was the reentry vehicle (RV) for the W-53, a 9.2MT warhead, and it sat atop a Titan II ICBM. In September 1980, while performing maintenance, a worker dropped a wrench socket that fell 70-feet and punched a hole in a fuel tank. Efforts to prevent the accident proved futile and the Titan II blew up in its launch silo. An extraordinarily violent explosion, it blasted a 740-ton launch pad door 200-feet in the air and it landed 600-feet from the silo. The Mark-6 followed the 740-ton door skyward, ricocheted off it and bounced along the ground before coming to rest several hundred feet from the silo.

One Air Force crewman died of injuries incurred and another suffered a broken leg after being blown 150-feet from the silo. Though unclassified photos do not exist, the Mark-6 reportedly remained intact and contained the W-53, which obviously did not explode. You would know if a 9.2MT bomb goes off. Its high explosives also did not detonate; this would have shredded the RV. So no radioactive materials were dispersed to the environment; in other words, the plutonium and uranium remained either in the weapon casing itself or within the RV.

This summary was obtained from unclassified sources. Classified reports on the accident exist, but those involving the Mark-6 and W-53 will probably remain classified. Still, I have no reason to doubt the unclassified reports: neither the W-53 nor its high explosives detonated and no radioactive materials were dispersed to the environment. The latter would have involved special cleanup crews that would have been quite visible to the general public and therefore impossible to keep secret.

If the Mark-6 can withstand such an extraordinarily violent explosion and not release any radioactive materials - it clearly was not designed to be blasted out of a silo - I firmly hold we have the know-how and expertise to build a cocoon (wrapper, enclosure or whatever you call it) that can withstand all accident scenarios of using a nuclear rocket engine to reach and return from LEO and not release any radioactive materials. If I am right, and I think I am, then we drop our launch costs dramatically, perhaps to $100/pound and then even lower. In summary, I strongly believe it's time to stop doubting and lambasting our technological muscle and get our country moving into Space, taking the world with us. But you have to read this book for that part of the argument.

James A. Dewar

This is a subject that the public in general has very little knowledge about. The book is very well written about a very technical subject. It reveals possibilities that, I'm sure, NASA engineers are well aware of but are reluctant to discuss openly with the public in that there is such a public outcry by a very vocal minority opposing anything nuclear. The only possible future for significant utilization of space as a resource is nuclear propulsion. Imagine using high impulse nuclear rockets to create huge solar power satellites in space! Nuclear propulsion is the only way it will ever happen. I highly recommend it to give you an overview of what the future in space exploration could look like.