Lucas Beveridge ☢️🚀

We've made some major progress on this... We have an agreement in place with a partner to use legacy reactor fuel in their possession. It's already fabricated and ready to use. This will save us >1 year and several million $'s. The biggest hurdle we have left is launch approval.

I decided to try making YouTube videos about my weird hobby projects. Here's episode 1 of building a functional spacecraft on my workbench: youtu.be/ZeACP6Ri_Zg?si…

We want to be the future xeno-archaeologists studying the ancient ruins of single planet civilizations. We do not want future alien xeno-archaeologists to be studying our ruins. California is a case study on how to end up in that second scenario. More evidence that bureaucrats + politicians + activists are definitely the Great Filter. "The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space — each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision." –Randall Munroe

Mindsets like this are why we can't have nice things. It's why electricity prices are far higher than they need to be. It's why we don't have abundant, reliable nuclear power. Civilizational sabotage.

@Truthful_ast I've seen people on YouTube attempting old weird engine concepts already lol

In the future there will be autistic rocket nerds who dig up old engine plans from the 70s and just build it themselves

@is_OwenLewis You could do maybe 15-20% c with staging too, but that also means you can get to 10% c with fission fragments, which is likely an easier problem than fusion. If we're only talking about small probes, there's a lot more options.

Fusion based propulsion can get us to 5-10% of c, so that's the best way until we start being able to mass manufacture antimatter. To boldly go!

Mainstream subreddits are insufferable when it comes to space colonization

@Robotbeat The Doers have never been loved by the Do-Nots. If we'd put it to a vote, we'd have banned spinning and weaving machines, steam engines, electricity, automobiles, and aircraft. Every one of those was opposed by some loud people in its day.

The “Science is Awesome” culture that got polarized against Musk went towards “humans don’t belong in space, only robots” and “fix Earth first” rhetoric.

Space Reactor 1 - Freedom has a name that's a bunch of related words thrown together to describe a mission that's a bunch of parts thrown together. And that's fine. Propulsion repurposed from Gateway, which is itself repurposed from Asteroid redirect. The reactor is something that needs to be tested for moon base. The payload is a bunch of Helicopters that JPL already developed and tested. It won't be a disaster if the payload doesn't make it to Mars. If you want to see a nuclear electric propulsion mission that's designed to exploit the full capabilities of the technology look at Project Prometheus, millions of dollars of work and testing for just the study. Would explore Jupiter's moon's with capabilities beyond any other mission. It would take $20billion to develop and decades to build and fly. And that meant it was easy to cancel, that's a lot of money to bet on an unproven nuclear electric propulsion spacecraft. SR-1F is the antidote to that, a demonstrator mission that proves a technology needed for the moon, tests NEP for other missions and uses existing hardware with very little time required to get to launch. And then when Project Prometheus: The Sequel is proposed critics will no longer be able to say it's untested technology.

Space launch was a clear case where there was a large difference in efficiency between what was possible and what was done in practice before SpaceX. A large part of that was due to everything being locked in to what (just barely) already worked, with huge risk aversion. WIth national prestige or a half billion dollar geosync satellite on the line, speculative engineering ideas that might result in a public debacle were not welcome. When failure is not an option, success can stay very expensive. You need to experiment to improve, and that fundamentally means being comfortable with failure. If you know it is going to work, it isn’t an experiment. I have long believed that nuclear power today is in precisely the same state as space launch two decades ago, but the even more pressing question now is if semiconductor fabrication might also be. On the one hand, Moore’s Law has been a sequence of heroic miracles of technology at the wafer fabrication level, grinding out hundreds of compounding small improvements. On the other hand, fabs are “too big to fail”, and there are elements of extreme conservatism at play. Intel’s “Copy exactly!” fab development exemplifies that mindset – instead of every new building being an opportunity to explore and optimize processes, it was deemed more valuable to just replicate. While each individual machine may be straining against physical limits of technology, it is possible that the systems orchestrating them all together could be far from optimal. The explore / exploit axis is fundamental to all decision making, but human risk avoidance probably biases away from optimal exploration.

In the 1970's US intelligence agencies suspected that certain Soviet satellites were powered by nuclear reactors. Proof came from NASA's High Energy Astronomy Observatory - which observed radiation from the reactors whenever it came close to Cosmos 954 dia.mil/FOIA/FOIA-Elec…

The SR-1 mission is less than a year, so for now it doesn't matter. I agree though Stirling would be my first choice for a small reactor, and for exactly that reason (plus torque on the spacecraft), but stirling won't scale to megawatts, and I think you're wrong about there not being any demand for high power reactors. They cross 1kWe/kg at a couple MW. Once it's there, there will be uses for it. I'm sure you remember people putting down SpaceX 10+ years ago saying there was no demand for high cadence reusable launch. It's a catch-22

@NukeSpaceCadet How many years has this Brayton Cycle been endurance-tested for? Has this been tested with actual fission in a flight-like configuration?

Hot take: a Kilopower reactor for SR-1 would not only be easier to get done fast, but it’d be more USEFUL. Brayton is only tested for a ~3yr life, Stirling >14y. & there’s more mission demand for KRUSTY-like RTG stand-ins (probes) than 20kWe reactors. & can always have multiples.

@Robotbeat Based on what? Maybe you're just not aware of all the other work that's been done since then. They're using an existing completed design with existing supply chains. I don't see any showstoppers, except maybe government inertia

@NukeSpaceCadet DoE had more involvement with KRUSTY. BTW, I want to be incredibly clear: I don't think there's any other way to meet the 2028 deadline. Yes, obviously we can do a much better job. BUT if you actually want to fly by 2028, you have to shoot the engineers and build it.

@Robotbeat I don't see why it's necessary to use that design. I'll say it again, building a reactor is not that difficult. Even moderated. All the pieces exist. Given the modest operating requirements and lifetime of this mission, I don't see any showstoppers at all

@NukeSpaceCadet I don't think there IS a way to launch an operational space reactor by the end of 2028 without HEU. KRUSTY used HEU, and it's the only US modern space reactor to actually be tested with fission this century.

@Robotbeat The DoE is involved in SR-1 in large part for launch indemnification. If they own it, then it can be indemnified through the Price Anderson act. They can also use existing facilities at KSC without needing new NRC licenses for ground handling

@NukeSpaceCadet The DoE is going to be involved anyway. For NASA, might as well use HEU if it means it can be done in time.

I'm talking about launch approval. HEU is automatically Tier-III via NSPM-20, which means you have to prove there's no other way to do your mission without HEU. There's been a lot more recent space reactor development than you may realize, and some of that leverages existing supply chains. On top of that, HALEU is precious right now with so many companies needing it for SMRs and micro reactors

@NukeSpaceCadet We literally used HEU already, and we can do it again. And we can do Kilopower with HALEU just fine. It has a mass penalty. That's it. The major challenge of SR-1 is it needs to launch in just over 2 years. The only way that can be done is scope control.

@Docquistador The desire to doom humanity to extinction is evil. I can fully explain that, in fact I think I just did?

Why do people treat Earth and space as a dichotomy?

I am trying to steelman anti-space arguments for an article, but I am genuinely finding it tough because these people have got so far out over their skis. They’ve had uninterrupted feedback from only people who agree for so long that it’s hard to find where their arguments connect to reality. People get to the point of publishing entire books without ever having encountered an opposing view, it seems