One hundred fifty-four feet long, packed with 700 tons of propellant and anchored to the side of a Utah hill, a solid rocket motor developed for NASA’s next generation of rockets is to unleash 3.6 million pounds of thrust in a test Tuesday morning.
Whether this motor design will ever go anywhere is uncertain.
To critics, the solid rocket motor — an elongated version of the boosters that fly on the space shuttles — is expensive, antiquated technology.
I strongly agree with the critics. This is centuries old technology -- essentially big high tech Roman candles. Chemical rockets, both solid and liquid fueled, are far too inefficient to even safely get us to our closest planetary neighbor, Mars. The effects of prolonged zero gravity and cosmic ray bombardment on human crews requires the shortest round trip travel time possible. Nuclear rockets would be far preferable, but a socially prevalent anti-nuclear hysteria makes the development and implementation of such nuclear rockets problematic. To read the rest of the article, click here.