DOW-UAP-D126, AAWSAP DIRD, Advanced Nuclear Propulsion for Manned Deep Space Missions, March 2010

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Advanced Nuclear Propulsion for Manned Deep Space Prepared by: Acquisition Support Division (DW0-3) Defense Warning Office Directorate for Analysis Defense Intelligence Agency AAP Person 72 Administrative Note COPYRIGHT WARNING: Further dissemination of the photographs in this publication is not authorized. This product is one in a series of advanced technology reports produced in FY 2009 under the Defense Intelligence Agency, Defense Warning Office's Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications (AAWSA). Program. Comments or questions pertaining to this document should be addressed tolAAP Person 1 AAWSA Program Manager, Defense Intelligence Agency, ATTN: CLAR/DWO-3, Bldg 6000, Washington,

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Deuterium, Argon Ion Lasers, and Kev Superexplosives ........................................ 1 Magnetic Insulation and Inductive Charging .......................................................... 3 Inductive Charging.................................................................................................................................... 4 Deuterium as the Preferred Nuclear Rocket Fuel.................................................... 5 Magnetic Entrapment of the Charged Fusion Products and the Stopping of the Proton Beam in Dense Deuterium .......................................................................... 6 Solution in Between Two Extremes ...................................................................... 10 The Nonfission Ignition of Small Deuterium Nuclear Explosives .......................... 13 Delivery of a Gev Proton Beam Onto the Deuterium Fusion Explosive .................. 15 Lifting of Large Payloads Into Earth Orbit ............................................................ 16 Neutron Entrapment in an Autocatalytic Thermonuclear Detonation Wave - a Means to Increase the Specific Impulse and to Solve the Large Radiator Problem18 Testing the Deuterium Microdetonation Concept.................................................. 20 Appendix: Conjectured Metastable Superexplosives Formed Under High Pressure for Thermonuclear Ignition .................................................................................. 26 Bombardment of a Solid Target With an Intense Relativistic Electron or Ion Bombardment of a Solid Target With Beams or By Hypervelocity Impact, Followed By a Convergent Shock Wave ............................................................ 28

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Figure 1. Ignition With 107-Ampere GeV Proton Beam ......................................... 11 Figure 2. Pure Deuterium Fusion Explosion Ignited With an Intense Ion Beam ... 14 Figure 3. Screening of the Spacecraft................................................................... 14 Figure 4. Superconducting "Atomic" Spaceship.................................................... 15 Figure 5. Argon Ion Laser Igniter......................................................................... 17 Figure 6. Autocatalytic Thermonuclear Detonation Using a Soft X-ray ................. 18 Figure 7. Ordinary Marx Generator....................................................................... 21 Figure 10. Detail View of a Section of the Super Marx Generator ......................... 22 Figure 12. Showing a Few Elements of the Super Marx Generator ....................... 22 Figure 13. The Superconducting Toroidal Capacitor and Its Discharge Onto the Figure 15. With Increasing Pressure, Electron-Bridges are Formed Between Shells Inside Shells Melting Into Common Shells ................................ 26 Figure 17. Inertial Confinement Fast-Ignition Configuration................................ 30 Table 1. The Charged Fusion Products of a Detonation in Deuterium: Their Energy and Velocity .................................................................................. 5 Table 2. Critical Ignition Currents for Thermonuclear Reactions ............................ 8

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Advanced Nuclear Propulsion for Manned Deep Space My interest in space flight dates to when I was about 10 years old and received as a birthday gift a popular book about the feasibility of space flight. From it I learned for the first time about Oberth and Goddard and of the possibility of reaching the Moon with a multistage rocket. This occurred at the same time that Hahn and Strassmann announced the discovery of nuclear fission, with the possibility of an atomic bomb by a fission chain reaction. Having been born in Germany in 1929, I received my Ph.D. in physics under Heisenberg in 1955. Inspired by the 15-megaton hydrogen bomb test conducted by the United States in 1952, I have been deeply interested in the nonfission ignition of thermonuclear reactions by inertial confinement since 1954. At the time all fusion research in the United States was still classified, but I had quite independently discovered the basic principles of inertial confinement, the Guderley convergent shock wave, and the Rayleigh imploding shell solutions. In 1956 I presented my findings at a meeting organized by Von Weizsacker at the Max Planck Institute in Goettingen. The abstracts of this meeting reside today in the University of Stuttgart library. In 1958 I had delivered a paper at the 2nd United Nations Conference on the Peaceful Use of Atomic Energy on Nerva-type nuclear rocket reactors. The paper turned out to be of some importance as I was invited by the U.S. government to come to the United States under "Operation Paperclip." In San Diego I met Ted Taylor and Freeman Dyson, who were working on the famous "Orion" nuclear bomb propulsion concept. This concept is generally credited to Stanislaw Ulam, but I know from conversations I had with Heisenberg that a similar idea had been presented to Heisenberg by Wernher von Braun in Berlin in or around 1942. Because of my idea to use the Guderley convergent shock wave solution for thermonuclear ignition, Ted Taylor and Freeman Dyson were interested in my joining their group. But because at that time this work was classified and I was not yet a U.S. citizen, this was not possible. In 1967 I saw a new possibility for the nonfission ignition of thermonuclear microexplosions by intense relativistic electron and ion beams, driven by a high-voltage Marx generator. This ignition concept could be used not only to control the release of energy by nuclear fusion, but also to propel a spacecraft, replacing the pusher plate of the Orion concept with a magnetic mirror, reflecting the plasma-fireball of the thermonuclear microexplosion (Reference 1, 2). This idea was adopted by the British Interplanetary Society in its 1978 Project Daedalus starship study, replacing a neutron-rich deuterium-tritium (OT) thermonuclear explosive with a neutron-poor deuterium-helium3 (DHe3) explosive (Reference 3). Unlike the OT reaction, in which 80 percent of the released energy goes into neutrons, most of the energy in the D-He3 reaction goes into alpha particles, which can be deflected by a magnetic mirror. But

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because He3 is not abundantly available everywhere, it was proposed to "mine" it from Jupiter's atmosphere. Studies have been conducted on spacecraft propulsion with the matter­ antimatter annihilation reaction, however, it is an enormous technical challenge to produce antimatter in appreciable quantities. The idea of using nano-gram amounts of antimatter for the ignition of fission-fusion microexplosions appears to have credible potential, but even there the production and storage of nano-gram quantities of antimatter pose serious technical problems (Reference 4). We have little reason to expect that new fundamental laws of physics that