More Bounce to the Ounce

This is a really enjoyable read. Majiec is a great writer and speaker. A breath of fresh air compared much of modern blog/essay content.

This idea is a significant part of Anathem by Neal Stephenson.

I've thought that if this idea is picked up it would have to be in space. Testing the rocket on the surface of the moon (point the plate straight up) would probably have been necessary anyway. Ordinary chemical rockets can be tested on the Earth's surface, this concept, not so much.

This is among the reason I've thought nuclear waste should be disposed of in space. Send the stuff onto the moon; if future lunar inhabitants want to mine it for plutonium in the naturally radiation-soaked landscape that is the lunar surface, let them.

Article briefly talked about delivery, which is tricky to do precisely at best of times, but didn't really mention how to address delivery into a nuclear blast. Hundreds of meters behind the craft about once a second doesn't seem like it would be enough time for the blast to clear so would get in the way of sending a new capsule backward. Anyway I'm sure it's just an implementation detail

> There are some drawbacks to the nuclear bomb rocket.

You don't say.

A version of this idea was mentioned in one of the Three Body Problem books. There, the bombs were pre-positioned along a path and detonated sequentially like dominos, with a vehicle riding the blast waves.

Note: there is a paywall much later in the post, but even the free part is a wonderful read.

Why say 'brisance' when you could say 'jounce per ounce'.

Wild cowboy ideas of yore. Will we ever be able to make it safer to use on earth or would we save that for a moon base -get to the moon and from there blast away with these atomic fahrting machines…

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