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

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Society, it was proposed to "mine" He 3 from the atmosphere of Jupiter. In either case,
the cost to recover appreciable amounts of He3 would be very high.
For the DD reaction, the situation is quite different because there the instantaneous
burn with deuterium of the T- and He3 - reaction products of deuterium makes possible
a detonation wave in dense deuterium. In this detonation wave, only 38 percent of the
energy released goes into neutrons, compared with 80 percent for the DT reaction.
Deuterium can be extracted from water with relative ease in three steps:
• Water is electrolytically split into hydrogen and oxygen.
• The hydrogen gas, composed of Hz and HD, is cooled down until it liquefies,
whereby the heavier HD is separated by the force of gravity from the lighter Hz.
• The newly produced HD is heated and passed through a catalyst, splitting HD into
Hz and Dz, according to the equation (Reference 7) 2HD ____... Hz+ Dz.
Since the gravitational field on the surface of a comet or small planet, from which the
Dz shall be extracted, is small, the apparatus separating the liquid HD from Hz must be
set into rapid rotation.
The comparatively small amount of energy needed for the separation can ideally be
drawn from a ferroelectric capacitor (for example, a barium-titanate capacitor with a
dielectric constant£ ~ 5,000), to be charged up to many kilovolts by a small fraction of
the electric energy drawn from the deuterium fusion explosions through a magneto
hydrodynamic loop (Reference 2). One can also draw this energy from a small on-board
nuclear reactor requiring only a small radiator, slowly charging the capacitor.
Alternatively, one may store the needed energy in the magnetic field of a
superconductor.
For the launching of the spacecraft into Earth orbit, a very different scheme is
proposed. It requires special materials that are readily available on Earth but not on
extraterrestrial bodies serving as landing points to refuel the spacecraft. There the
primary resource is water from which deuterium is obtained.
In the Orion bomb propulsion project, a large number of fission bombs, or fission-
triggered fusion bombs, were proposed to lift the spacecraft into space. Since this
would release a large amount of highly radioactive fission products into the
atmosphere, it was one of the causes that killed Orion. Even though large payloads can
be brought into Earth orbit by chemical rockets, this remains very expensive, and an
acceptable less expensive nuclear alternative is highly desirable.
There appear to be two possibilities:
• A laser driven by a high explosive, powerful enough to ignite a DT microexplosion,
which in turn can initiate a thermonuclear detonation in deuterium (Reference 8).
• A second, more speculative possibility is the conjectured existence of chemical
kiloelectronvolt (keV) superexplosives. These are chemical compounds formed under
high pressure, resulting in keV bridges between inner electron shells and able to
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