AAWSAP DIRD, Advanced Nuclear Propulsion for Manned Deep Space Missions, March 2010

This Defense Intelligence Reference Document is dated 11 March 2010. It was prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency's Defense Warning Office as part of the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications program. It is a technical paper arguing that spacecraft driven by deuterium thermonuclear reactions could be built with current science and could reach the outer solar system. It covers magnetic insulation, ignition by proton beams, a Super Marx generator and conjectured chemical superexplosives. It does not discuss any UFO sightings.

From the source: Release of 2026-09-18 Incident: 3/11/10, Las Vegas, Nevada. Released with redactions. This document is a Defense Intelligence Reference Document (DIRD), a technical reference format used by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to capture baseline knowledge on a specific topic for later analytic use. DIRDs are best understood as reference and synthesis products rather than as original research. It is one of 38 DIRDs produced under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) between 2009 and 2011. Because AAWSAP’s scope permitted a broad range of supporting topics, not every DIRD in the series directly concerns aerospace systems or future threat assessment. The following summary reflects the DIRD’s scope and framing at the time of writing and should not be read as implying current validation of the concepts discussed. This DIRD examines advanced nuclear propulsion for crewed deep-space travel and argues that human missions beyond the Moon would require propulsion systems with both very high thrust and very high specific impulse, which the author contends are difficult to achieve with conventional chemical, nuclear-thermal, and nuclear-electric systems. The report focuses on concepts derived from Project Orion, the discontinued General Atomics nuclear pulse propulsion study sponsored first by ARPA and later by the U.S. Air Force between 1958 and 1965, in which a spacecraft would be driven by repeated nuclear explosions. In this case, the DIRD emphasizes small non-fission-triggered fusion explosions using deuterium, magnetic mirrors, and other unconventional ignition concepts intended to avoid the inefficiencies associated with small fission devices. It presents these ideas as a possible pathway to crewed missions across the solar system, while also linking them to broader visions of long-range human expansion into space. The document is exploratory in character and depends on several unproven ignition methods, enabling technologies, and engineering assumptions. Overall, it is a theoretical examination of fusion-based pulse propulsion concepts rather than as a documentary account of a technology nearing practical realization.

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potential equal to V requires an electron number density n~v/ neR2 . For V = 109 volts
::::l 3 x 106 esu and R = 103cm, one finds that n ~ 2 x 109 cm- 3 , well below nmax,
Deuterium as the Preferred Nuclear Rocket Fuel
To appreciate the importance of deuterium as the preferred and abundantly available
nuclear rocket fuel, one must consider the secondary reactions with D of the He3 and T
reaction products from D-D fusion. Taking these reactions into account, one obtains
from 6 deuterium nuclei an energy of 26.8 megaelectronvolts (MeV) in charged fusion
products, made up of He3 and H, and an energy of 16.55 MeV in neutrons. This means
62 percent of the energy is released into charged fusion products and 38 percent into
neutrons-a substantial improvement over the DT reaction, in which only 20 percent of
the energy goes into He4 .
Of interest also is the average velocity, averaged over the momentum of the charged
fusion products, because it is a measure of the maximum specific impulse, respectively
the maximum exhaust velocity:
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_ L m;v;
v = ~i=~I __
6 (7)
I m;
i= I
-
For the six charged fusion reaction products (given in Table 1), one obtains v =
l.S x 109 cm/s.
Table 1. The Charged Fusion Products of a Detonation in Deuterium: Their
Energy and Velocity
Fusion Product Energy [MeV] Velocity lOY [cm/s]
Hej 0.8 1.23
H 3.0 2.40
H 14.7 5.30
He4 3.6 1.31
He4 3.7 1.33
T 1.0 0.80
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