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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To estimate the order of magnitude of what is needed, we consider a spacecraft with a
mass of M0 = 103 ton = 109 g , to be accelerated by one g ~ 103 cm/s 2, with a thrust
T = M0g ~ 1012 dyn. To establish the magnitude and number of fusion explosions needed
to propel the spacecraft to a velocity of v= 100 km/s = 107 cm/s, we use the equation
T= cdm (22)
dt
where we set c ~ 108 cm/s, equa l to the expansion velocity of the fus ion bomb plasma.
We thus have
dm T
- = - = 10 4 g/s = 10 kg/s (23)
dt C
The propulsion power is given by
P=~ dm =~T (24)
2 cit 2
which in our example is P = 5 x l019 erg/s.
With E = 4 x l019 erg equivalent to the explosive energy of one kiloton of TNT, Pis
equivalent to about one nuclear kiloton bomb per second.
From the rocket equation
(25)
where M ois the initial and M1 the final mass, and setting M1 = M o- !::,M, where
t,..M <<Mo is the mass of all used up bombs, one has
(26)
Here v is the velocity reached by the spacecraft after having used up all the bombs of
mass~. If one bomb explodes per second, its mass according to equat ion (23) is m o
= 104 g.
UNCLASSIFIED/ /FOA 8FFI€lIAL l!l!H! 8HLY
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