The most important parameter of an engine like that is velocity of particles emitted as reaction mass (translate to specific impulse). Thermal rocket is going to loose to well designed electric one. Electric rocket can propel ions to huge velocities basically functioning as a small particle accelerator.
The issues currently are ability to get enough thrust (density of the particle stream) and preventing materials from decaying due to energetic particles.
Thermal rocket will be limited to very small, thermal velocities.
> Thermal rocket is going to loose to well designed electric one.
Depends on your metric. For a given tech level, you'll get higher thrust/weight out of a Nuclear Thermal Rocket than you would from a Nuclear Electric Rocket, even if the specific impulse is lower.
And 'very small velocities' here is still double the ISP of hydrolox, so not exactly shabby...
I assume neither design is going to lift off Earth's surface. Most likely any nuclear engine is going to be lifted cold and disassembled and we'll packaged in case of mishap.
Since you are going to have months to run the engine, thrust to weight is less important than ISP. Small accelerations do wonders if you can run them continuously.
Small accelerations over long periods are great! But when you're using electric propulsion, how small starts to become an issue. As far as I'm aware ion thrusters have TWRs in the 1/1000 range - NERVA's were in the ~1 range. This means you're taking a 3000 second burn and replacing it with a 3,000,000 second burn - add in efficiency losses and things start getting interesting. (assuming a constant mass fraction devoted to engines, and that the electric propulsion TWR includes power generation and cooling)
Hydrogen arcjets are going in between 1300-2000 seconds ISP, and are 30%-40% efficient, which is huge by electric standards of electric propulsors, and are can be done with tens of newtons thrust, with 100+ newton per engine deemed possible.
And you can get 1300-1500s ISP from a liquid core NTR, too - or 3-5000s from a gas core NTR. Sure, no one's ever built a liquid core NTR, but there have been designs made.
And needless to say, "tens of newtons" is not the projected thrust of a liquid core NTR. More like a few hundred thousand.
Scalability, and scale matter too. I believe that solar electric thrust to weight ratio is very favourable with modern solar cells, and scalable.
Arcjets can be really tiny, and you can have hundreds of them. Given that you will also have to get huge amount of electricity for crew needs, you will have to pack solar cells anyway. A bimodal NTR will be even heavier, and require even bigger vehicle to legitimise its use.
Only minimum scale really matters - past that you can just cluster engines to get the desired acceleration. Minimum scale for any sort of nuclear thermal rocket is below what you'd want for a manned interplanetary mission, and is thus not relevant.
Solar power plus ion engines is in the 1/2000 TWR range as far as I'm aware. That means millimeters per second squared acceleration of your total craft at best, and means you basically don't save any time over a standard minimum-delta-v Hohmann transfer - 0.001 m/s^2 continuous acceleration gets you 2 AU in ~400 days. It could also do 66,717,283km - the Earth-Mars distance at time of writing - in ~189 days. A Hohmann transfer from Earth to Mars is 259 days. And, of course, the above numbers don't take into consideration matching velocities or escaping Earth's gravity well in the first place. [1] does a good job of describing why the power supply is the primary limiting factor here.
Liquid-core NTRs [0] aren't bimodal, and I'm sort of confused what you'd mean by bimodal here in the first place.
6.4kg 50N 30%-40% efficient hydrogen arcjet, and 1kg/kw solar panels will probably scale up until a 1.5-2kn, which is really a lot of for a relatively efficient, 1000s+ ISP engine made using existing material science.
Current hall-effect engines can produce thrust for 50,000 hrs (~5.8yrs) before needing refurbishment. This is enough for a few trips to Mars.
Even if they cut a week or two off the travel time, they might be worth it on craft with humans as an extra week or two of life support is fairly heavy (~2kg/day/person).
Ion thrusters = technical problem. Thermal rocket = fundamentally limited by rocket equation.
With thermal rocket you need huge amounts of reaction mass because it is expelled at slow speeds (it gives little push relative to its mass) and then you need more reaction mass to push that reaction mass and so on. This hugely limits what you can do.
Ion thrusters are largely technical problem of erosion. Current designs have trouble withstanding continuous load because ions hit electrodes and erode them. But there is no physical limitations. Superconducting electromagnets, maybe something else. Somebody hopefully gets a good idea and gets reasonable thrust from ion engine.
Ion engines are still limited by power density - higher ISPs take quadratically more power input at reasonable ISPs. (As in, at non-relativistic velocities) Thermal rockets have a lower upper bound, but come with higher thrusts. Everything is tradeoffs, in the end.
And why on earth would the kind of newtonial engine mean that you wouldn't be limited by the rocket equation? The only escape that is to have reaction mass outside of your reference frame somehow. (picking up fuel from interstellar space, having thrust beamed to you via laser, some form of reactionless drive...)
No body are talking about plasma rockets (VASIMIR). Elctric rockets that have variable ISP on demand (low-thrust, high–specific impulse exhaust or relatively high-thrust, low–specific impulse exhaust). Also, VASIMR does not use electrodes so not erosion problem.
Oberth effect is for long term missions where you have time to swing by other planets or moons just to get some free velocity. This is fantastic, but costs huge amount of mission time.
The nuclear engine is about getting so much delta v that you can cut the crap and power directly to your destination.
Not really. An 85 ton Starship fueled in LEO can use Oberth effect, get to Mars just as fast, and land directly on Mars.
Your deep space NTR has engines that weigh way at least ten times more, while providing only a fraction of the thrust, and also has to push not only hundreds of tons of radiators, shielding and heavier tanks, but also a lander since NTR doesn’t have the thrust to climb out of any significant gravity well. And also is going to have substantial propellant evaporation by the time it reaches Mars since it can only achieve that ISP with hydrogen.
Oberth effect is useful for every reasonable trip - since every reasonable trip either originates or ends deep within a gravity well. (And being in orbit deep within a gravity well implies being at high velocity) It's why you make an escape burn at periapsis and not apoapsis.
From what I read, electric engines have some pretty big limitations.
- Very low thrust makes it hard to use the oberth effect
- Low thrust to weight ratio makes the actual wet/dry mass ratio harder to get down
- You are not just thrust limited, but also thermal limited. Many other rockets expel a lot of the heat they generate through the exhaust. Electrical engines do not, which means needing to get rid of that heat in other ways.
It's really not the most important parameter, though. Unless you get the necessary thrust levels, the efficiency (Isp) of electric propulsion will get you very efficiently nowhere.
And don't get me wrong - electric is amazing and well working, but if you want to move serious payload to Mars, that's not going to work for a while.
You still need to get rid of excess heat, which scales linearly with power. The more engines, the bigger the radiators you need to carry, which will increase your total mass.
> The most important parameter of an engine like that is velocity of particles emitted as reaction mass (translate to specific impulse).
Hum... That's true for simple designs. Once you start transforming one kind of energy into another, you have to deal with a more complex form that is how much total momentum you can eject from a fixed amount of fuel (and weight it by the mass of the engines that stays on the rocket).
Powering those ion thrusters is a bit of a problem at the mass ranges you need for peopled interplanetary flight. Either you have an absolutely enormous solar array, or an absolutely enormous radiator array for your nuclear reactor.
Those aren't necessarily all that massive, though. Enormous in size, yes, but the mass would be a lot less than the mass of the fuel for less efficient rockets like chemical or nuclear thermal.
Either way, any vessel travelling beyond Mars or Venus in a time short enough to be safe for humans is going to require in orbit assembly, so size in terms of volume becomes less of a constraint. But as long as we're boosting all of our mass from Earth, that's what costs the money.
I think STR is the best possible competitor to chemical rockets for trips inside Jupiter’s orbit. NTR is what we will need out past Jupiter unless a few brave souls use chemical rockets for the fame of being first to make those extremely long expeditions to Jupiter and beyond. Much like early explorers in the age of sail.
