Wild cowboy ideas of yore. Will we ever be able to make it safer to use on earth or would we save that for a moon base -get to the moon and from there blast away with these atomic fahrting machines…
dylan604•Jul 17, 2026
With hindsight being 20/20 and all, it always makes me laugh at how 1950s pro-atomics a lot of things seemed to be. Yes, it was the new, like AI is today so everyone was all about it. Yet there never seemed to be any concerns of the downsides of things like the pesky nuclear waste or fallout. Looking back at films and magazines, the feel of TFA and Fallout are not out of place which is part of what makes them good.
showerst•Jul 17, 2026
With any luck, by the time we're serious about sending big spacecraft out and about we'll have figured out a workable fusion drive. You'd still need to launch them from space since they're a little spicy from a "don't stand downwind" perspective, but unimaginably better than using nukes against pusher.
jebarker•Jul 17, 2026
This is a really enjoyable read. Majiec is a great writer and speaker. A breath of fresh air compared much of modern blog/essay content.
“Pez dispenser for Armageddon” is incredible imagery
alexjplant•Jul 17, 2026
The Zapp & Roger shout-out in the title is gold too.
tclancy•Jul 17, 2026
Or Pepsi Cola, depending on one's age.
MarkusQ•Jul 17, 2026
> There are some drawbacks to the nuclear bomb rocket.
You don't say.
nicbou•Jul 17, 2026
Note: there is a paywall much later in the post, but even the free part is a wonderful read.
GoatOfAplomb•Jul 17, 2026
I think this set a record for me on how much article was available before the paywall.
idlewords•Jul 17, 2026
I am trying to be friendly with the paywall.
foobarian•Jul 17, 2026
Article briefly talked about delivery, which is tricky to do precisely at best of times, but didn't really mention how to address delivery into a nuclear blast. Hundreds of meters behind the craft about once a second doesn't seem like it would be enough time for the blast to clear so would get in the way of sending a new capsule backward. Anyway I'm sure it's just an implementation detail
jcs•Jul 17, 2026
In a vacuum, there isn’t a fireball hanging around for the next charge to cross; the plasma is moving outward at thousands of km/s.
idlewords•Jul 17, 2026
A lot of the work was done to a design point of 0.25 seconds, and Dyson's book says the issue there wasn't the blast clearing, but just being able to move the machinery fast enough. I kind of share your puzzlement; I can see the blast clearing this quickly in space (the debris moves at tens of thousands of km/sec) but not in the atmosphere.
pfdietz•Jul 17, 2026
I've thought that if this idea is picked up it would have to be in space. Testing the rocket on the surface of the moon (point the plate straight up) would probably have been necessary anyway. Ordinary chemical rockets can be tested on the Earth's surface, this concept, not so much.
This is among the reason I've thought nuclear waste should be disposed of in space. Send the stuff onto the moon; if future lunar inhabitants want to mine it for plutonium in the naturally radiation-soaked landscape that is the lunar surface, let them.
IAmBroom•Jul 17, 2026
> This is among the reason I've thought nuclear waste should be disposed of in space. Send the stuff onto the moon
Congrats; you have come up with a way to make nuclear waste disposal 100x more dangerous and 1000x more expensive!
pwg•Jul 17, 2026
And set the stage for "Space 1999"'s lunar escape from earth.
Nice set design, but honestly unwatchable. An accidental testament to the genius of ST:TOS.
pfdietz•Jul 17, 2026
You need to think more clearly about this.
Reprocessing is very expensive; $1000/kg and up. Launch to space will likely become much cheaper than this as fully reusable launch vehicles become available. Even if the spent fuel must be armored against accident the cost of launching it to LEO, and then to the moon, is likely to become much cheaper than the cost of reprocessing it here on Earth.
Space disposal has the positive advantage that the seven very long lived fission products are removed from the biosphere, along with the very long lived actinides like Np-237.
psadri•Jul 17, 2026
A version of this idea was mentioned in one of the Three Body Problem books. There, the bombs were pre-positioned along a path and detonated sequentially like dominos, with a vehicle riding the blast waves.
kurthr•Jul 17, 2026
It is more similar to the Medusa method. Lots of ideas have been proposed. One problem is getting the nukes prepositioned (and they won't easily stay in one spot!) with chemical rockets is quite challenging (rather than carrying them and launching them along the way) and also they would actually need to be set in groups of 3 to provide balanced forces along an axis, or alternately along a parabolic helix to compensate for directional errors.
9 Comments
https://idlewords.com/2006/04/argentina_on_two_steaks_a_day....
https://idlewords.com/2014/07/sana_a.htm
You don't say.
This is among the reason I've thought nuclear waste should be disposed of in space. Send the stuff onto the moon; if future lunar inhabitants want to mine it for plutonium in the naturally radiation-soaked landscape that is the lunar surface, let them.
Congrats; you have come up with a way to make nuclear waste disposal 100x more dangerous and 1000x more expensive!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_1999
Reprocessing is very expensive; $1000/kg and up. Launch to space will likely become much cheaper than this as fully reusable launch vehicles become available. Even if the spent fuel must be armored against accident the cost of launching it to LEO, and then to the moon, is likely to become much cheaper than the cost of reprocessing it here on Earth.
Space disposal has the positive advantage that the seven very long lived fission products are removed from the biosphere, along with the very long lived actinides like Np-237.
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2024/04/17/medusa-deep-space...