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ESA’s meteorite bricks hit Lego stores, but don’t get your wallet out just yet
ESA’s space brick has landed in LEGO® stores, but you can’t buy the 3D-printed items to add to your own creations.
We visited the Leicester Square Lego store in central London to check out the brick, which arrived at the end of June. It can be found on the top floor of the store, lurking at the back of what Lego calls the “Interactive Space Area,” protected behind a layer of Perspex.
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Is there a word for something that is both tremendously exciting, and horribly terrifying, at the same time? If there is, DRACO is that.
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Project Orion or bust.
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Oh no, Orion was just flat out horrifying. This is at least in theory, less so. Use a nuclear reactor to heat liquid hydrogen to >3000k and fire it out the back. If you end up nuking yourself, at least it’s an accident!
See? Easy and safe, right? Other than launching a nuclear reactor on a chemical rocket into orbit, then firing it up. I mean, what could go wrong?
(That’s Anxiety, for anyone who hasn’t seen the movie yet.)
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There have been some 40 or so fission reactors launched over the years and some 30 or so are still in orbit.
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One of the more bonkers suggestions is from, surprise, Bob Zubrin:
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So no worries, great! The system really does seem genius, and lots better than what we have now. I am not a rocket geek, though. Is this better than the ion drive from Dawn?
Additionally, for a non-engineer, please, is an RTG or RHU a fission reactor in truth? These seem less scary, but I am not sure if that is logical or not.
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The short answer is: no fission reaction, basically just a lump of 238Pu that decays.
Most of the energy emitted is thermal radiation. It’s an an RTG when the heat is used to generate electricity and an RHU when the heat is used as, well, a heater; usually to keep electronic systems happy. (The British Blue Peaock tactical nuke oddly used chickens for that, but I digress. Again.)
You know, what they used to power pacemakers:
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2015/ph241/degraw2/
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That one is fusion-powered. But Dawn’s external nuclear reactor is totally unshielded, and even though it’s a great distance away from Earth’s surface (about 93,000,000 miles away) it has still been known to cause radiation-linked cancers and even deaths. So at least DRACO won’t have those downsides.
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