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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From the burning plasma behind the detonation front, energy flows into all spatial
directions. Part is by bremsstrahlung and part by electronic heat conduction. Roughly
half of the energy flows into the liner, one-quarter into the still unburned fuel ahead of
the wave, and one-quarter into the opposite direction. The bremsstrahlung emission
rate is given by
(28)
For T = 109 K, one has &, ;::: 3.2 x 10-23 n2 [erg/cm 3s]. The flux of the bremsstrahlung
that goes into the liner is &, r/2, where r is the radius of the deuterium rod just behind
the detonation front. About one-half of this radiation runs ahead of the detonation
front, where it precompresses the deuterium. Its intensity is:
E r 23 '
- '-::::10- n· r [erg/cm 2s] (29)
4
with nr;::: 3 x 1024cm ·2 (corresponding pr;::: 10 g/cm 2), one has
Er
- '- :a:: 30n[erg/cm 2s] (30)
4
We are aiming at a density where the neutrons are absorbed in the burning plasma
cylinder of radius r. If the neutron-deuteron collision cross section is a, then the
neutron path length An must be smaller than r:
1 (31)l,,=-<;;,r
nc,
or
1
nr ~ c, (32)
One typically has a;::: 10·24 cm 2 , hence
nr ~ 1024 cm 2 (33)
If r = 0.01 cm, then n ~ 1026 cm·3 = 5 x 103 no, where no = 5 x 1022 cm·3 , the particle
number density of liquid deuterium. With n = 1026 cm·3 , one finds that
s,.r/4 :a:: 3x l027 erg/cm 2s. The flux on a deuterium tube of radius rand length z, where
for the burn zoner ;::: z, one obta ins onto its surface (s,. /4)2nrz :a:: 1024 erg/s = 1017 watts
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