CHAPTER 4
Using the gift given to humanity by the twentieth-century Prometheuses who inhabited the Oak Ridge and Los Alamos National Laboratories in the 1940s, the liquid hydrogen propellant flowed through the core of the nuclear thermal rocket engine, heating it to over twelve hundred degrees Celsius and giving the unmanned stage a kick as it then accelerated out of Earth orbit and into interplanetary space. There was no smoke, not just because there was no air, but because the heated hydrogen wasn’t combusting at all. It had merely been superheated in order to create an overpressure inside the rocket engine’s “combustion chamber” which wasn’t really a combustion chamber at all. And then the overpressured hydrogen gas was accelerated due to the laws of fluid flow and thermodynamics down a converging nozzle to a small opening that rocket scientists called the “throat” where it reached supersonic flow speeds. From there the gas continued to accelerate out a diverging nozzle into space. At no point was a detonation, deflagration, or combustion exothermic reaction required. The nuclear core was simply there to heat up a liquid and turn it into hot gas just as it would if it were in a power plant back on Earth. But instead of using the hot gas to turn a turbine and generate electricity, this reactor was heating propellant to provide propulsion at twice the efficiency of any conventional chemical rocket, including even the most efficient and effective combustion based rocket engines ever built before such as the Space Shuttle Main Engines and the F1s of the Saturn V era.
No, this rocket wasn’t like most of its ancestors. Instead of heating and expelling fuel through burning, it was being heated to much higher temperatures by the energy released from the splitting of uranium atoms in the core of the ship’s engines. First conceived and tested by the United States in the 1960s, Nuclear Thermal Rockets required only half the fuel to get the same performance as chemical rockets. This was the breakthrough that was going to allow humans to make the journey to Mars affordably and the flight was scheduled to begin two years hence.
Launched into space by NASA’s heavy lift rocket, the nuclear stage was designed to operate only once it was in space. The risks of using nuclear energy to launch rockets from the surface of the Earth was simply too great, or perceived to be, for anyone to suggest.
The news that the engine had started was greeted by shouts and cheers of joy in Mission Control, still located at the Johnson Space Center in Texas. While it was greeted by cheers, they were mostly preceded by the sound of people breathing after holding their breath too long in the adjunct control center at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. It was there that the engine was designed and no group of people could be happier that it worked. They knew all that could go wrong, the things they’d tried to design to mitigate, and sometimes knowledge can cause one to be pessimistic. Pessimism, and its cousin, Murphy, of Murphy’s Law, were not around. The engines performed as designed and they worked flawlessly.
“Hot damn!” Exclaimed the Marshall Chief Engineer, Paula Downey. Downey was a graduate of Stanford and had worked for NASA nearly all of her twenty-five-year career. She’d cut her teeth working on new space propulsion technologies back in the early 2000s and quickly proved to her peers and to senior management that she knew her engineering and was better than most at getting to the root cause of many engineering problems encountered in “rocket science.”
Downey began walking around the room, shaking hands, slapping backs and even hugging some of the engineers in the room who’d worked on the nuclear rocket project for these last several years. This was one of the reasons she was not only respected, for her engineering talents, but actually liked by her peers. She was a people person and knew how to relate to the many personality types that made up the workforce of NASA. It didn’t hurt that, at age fifty, she was still a beautiful woman with a figure that turned heads when she walked through a room. Her black hair was salted with grey and no one really cared if that was its natural color. She was a pleasure to see, to talk to, and to work with.
“Paula, I guess this means that we’re a go for Mars?” asked Dean Epperson, one of the systems engineers on the team.
“Dean, I guess it does. If the habitat and the lander teams can meet their testing milestones like this team did, we’ll be launching to Mars in just under two years.”
“I never thought I’d see the day,” he replied. “It seems like every time we think we’re going somewhere, the politicians or the bean counters pull the rug out from under us.”
“Let’s hope that doesn’t happen this time,” she said with a false and overly emphasized frown. “There’s too much at stake. Now that the Europeans, the Japanese, and the Chinese have signed on, I don’t think that even the upcoming presidential election will be able to slow us down.”
“Don’t say that! I was here when the shuttles stopped flying and the program to replace them was temporarily shut down. If you’d told me then that we’d be testing the systems to go to Mars, I’d think you were nuts. Never forget that we’re a political agency and all it’ll take to shut us down is one anti-space person in the White House.”
“That’s a good point, but this time I think we’ll make the transition. We’ve got the support of both parties in the Senate—strong support, I might add. It helps when you have former astronauts in each party handing the chairmanship of the Appropriations Committee back and forth every time the Senate changes hands. I don’t mean to sound patronizing, but I think we’ve got it covered.”
“I guess you’re right. Good thing I’m a test engineer and not a manager. I don’t see how you can stand it,” Dean said, looking somewhat like a dog with his tail between his legs.
“I know I’m right.” She smiled and replied, “That’s why I’m paid the big bucks.”