Saturn V first stage test firing

[Glaucus]

Reaching orbit is trivial compared to reaching Mars in under a week or interstellar travel.

With enough resources it should be possible to build nuclear craft that are so powerful only the human body limits the maximum acceleration at 10G.

Do you know what an ion engine is?
Ion is slow gradual acceleration over a huge period of time, it can not launch stuff into space, it wouldn't even be able to lift the engines weight off the ground, let alone a ship.

Nuclear pulse plate can reach huge speeds, but you have the issue of environmentalists and sheer cost. As you would need ~800 nuclear explosion to reach orbit, then several thousand more in space.

Reaching orbit is the costly and weight limiting bit, reaching mars is fairly easy.

The next generation of engines, will hopefully be reaction engines, which have so far passed all their individual component tests. This should slash the cost of delivering a kilo to LEO massively, and should open up building bigger spacecraft in orbit, or at least launching decent quantities of fuel up.

http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/news_updates.html

 

[Combat squirrel]

Reaching orbit is trivial compared to reaching Mars in under a week or interstellar travel.

With enough resources it should be possible to build nuclear craft that are so powerful only the human body limits the maximum acceleration at 10G.

Do you no what an ion engine is?
Ion is slow gradual acceleration over a huge period of time, it can not launch stuff into space, it wouldn't even be able to lift the engines wait of the ground, let alone a ship.

Nuclear pulse plate can reach huge speeds, but you have the issue of environmentalists and sheer coast. As you would need ~800 nuclear explosion to reach orbit, then several thousand more in space.

Reaching orbit is the costly and weight limiting bit, reaching mars is fairly easy.

What Glaucus said.

Nuclear engines have an awesome FUEL to weight ratio........but there actual thrust is barely anything, which is fine once you exit Earth orbit - I doubt they are even powerful enough to do that - well probably are thinking about it, but the required burn time at 107% thrust would negate the point of using nuclear engines, you would use all the fuel up for doing that.

Random guess, nuclear rocket engines say somewhere between 6-9:1 thrust to weight ratio, where as chemical rockets 60-100:1 thrust to weight ratio.

If your talking about Ion drives its like 000.000001:1 thrust to weight ratio.