Defense Intelligence Reference Document Advanced Nuclear Propulsion For Manned Deep Space Missions

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Advanced Nuclear Propulsion for Manned Deep Space
Missions
Preface
My interest in space flight dates to when I was about 10 years old and
received as a birthday gift a popular book about the feasibility of space flight.
From it I learned for the first time about Oberth and Goddard and of the
possibility of reaching the Moon with a multistage rocket. This occurred at the
same time that Hahn and Strassmann announced the discovery of nuclear
fission, with the possibility of an atomic bomb by a fission chain reaction.
Having been born in Germany in 1929, I received my Ph.D. in physics under
Heisenberg in 1955. Inspired by the 15-megaton hydrogen bomb test
conducted by the United States in 1952, I have been deeply interested in the
nonfission ignition of thermonuclear reactions by inertial confinement since
1954. At the time all fusion research in the United States was still classified,
but I had quite independently discovered the basic principles of inertial
confinement, the Guderley convergent shock wave, and the Rayleigh
imploding shell solutions. In 1956 I presented my findings at a meeting
organized by Von Weizsalcker at the Max Planck Institute in Goettingen. The
abstracts of this meeting reside today in the University of Stuttgart library.
In 1958 I had delivered a paper at the 2nd United Nations Conference on the
Peaceful Use of Atomic Energy on Nerva-type nuclear rocket reactors. The
paper turned out to be of some importance as I was invited by the U.S.
government to come to the United States under "Operation Paperclip." In San
Diego I met Ted Taylor and Freeman Dyson, who were working on the famous
"Orion" nuclear bomb propulsion concept. This concept is generally credited to
Stanislaw Ulam, but I know from conversations I had with Heisenberg that a
similar idea had been presented to Heisenberg by Wernher von Braun in Berlin
in or around 1942. Because of my idea to use the Guderley convergent shock
wave solution for thermonuclear ignition, Ted Taylor and Freeman Dyson were
interested in my joining their group. But because at that time this work was
classified and I was not yet a U.S. citizen, this was not possible.
In 1967 I saw a new possibility for the nonfission ignition of thermonuclear
microexplosions by intense relativistic electron and ion beams, driven by a
high-voltage Marx generator. This ignition concept could be used not only to
control the release of energy by nuclear fusion, but also to propel a spacecraft,
replacing the pusher plate of the Orion concept with a magnetic mirror,
reflecting the plasma-fireball of the thermonuclear microexplosion (Reference
1, 2). This idea was adopted by the British Interplanetary Society in its 1978
Project Daedalus starship study, replacing a neutron-rich deuterium-tritium
(OT) thermonuclear explosive with a neutron-poor deuterium-helium3 (DHe3)
explosive (Reference 3). Unlike the OT reaction, in which 80 percent of the
released energy goes into neutrons, most of the energy in the D-He3 reaction
goes into alpha particles, which can be deflected by a magnetic mirror. But
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