Opening the Next Frontier
by Anthony Tate

Part 4: So, why aren't we going?


The mood of the country has changed, at last. The mass swell of the 60's counterculture is passing through its lifecycle, and slowly clearing the way for new, younger, more aggressive leaders and thinkers. Slowly but steadily America is looking for those new frontiers. We are tired of resting on the laurels won for us by our grandfathers.

But one huge hurdle remains. While America's mood is looking for adventure, and our technology has emphatically progressed to the point that we can tackle hurdles of this size with less than a Herculean effort, science has not altered its rules one little bit.

And that is why the Space Shuttle uses fuels that are not even as good as the ones the moon Rocket used. We are stuck.

Sure, there is research into high energy metastable fuels. Liquid Ozone has been investigated as a possibly better oxidizer, but even with our better technology we can't make it stable enough to use.

Metallic hydrogen also has great potential, but we can't even make it last a few seconds, never mind make rocket fuel out of it. Spin-stabilized triplet helium also has huge potential, but it's even harder to make than metallic hydrogen. Sadly, it looks like chemistry is just not going to be amenable to our desires, at least not anytime soon. By anytime soon, I mean 'this century.' Metastable fuels are HARD.

So, it looks like we are stuck, despite our newly adventurous mood.

Well, not quite, but getting past the stubbornness of chemistry requires that we cheat. Or maybe make a little deal with the Devil.

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Contents:

1: The Frontier Spirit

2: What went wrong.

3: Where do we go next?

4: So, why aren't we going?

5: Dealing with the Devil

6: A brief technical interlude

7: So how good is Nuclear, anyway?

8: Heat, temperature, and cooling.

9: But isn't this dangerous?

10: Prometheus would be proud of us.

11: Ok, that all sounds nice, but this is just fantasy, right?

12: But isn't this just too big?

13: But doesn't this thing make nuclear waste?

14: Conclusions