Nice kudos my home country
That's a Chinese craft.
I don't think they need to put 550 tonnes into LEO quite yet. India also has nuclear weapons but I don't think they have enough of them to build an Orion nuclear pulse propulsion drive (800 30-tonne yield devices are required to put 300 tonnes into LEO). India has not signed the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty despite Nehru being one of the first world leaders to appeal for such a ban to be introduced back in 1954. However, I doubt they'd go that route. It's a peaceful use for nukes provided they're detonated outside the earth's magnetosphere. Maybe use Sea Dragon to get it there.I'd like to see India build Sea Dragon. The steel at the Alang ship-breakers looks inexpensive, and I think India has a submarine yard.
India has not signed the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty despite Nehru being one of the first world leaders to appeal for such a ban to be introduced back in 1954. However, I doubt they'd go that route.
Yeah, I've always suspected the economics and the potential for ecological damage of Sea Dragon have never been costed properly.India can make their lunar program work without super heavy lift. If they develop in-orbit fuel depots and in orbit construction they can go anywhere their program reasonably wants to go. If they US had adopted using their then-current EELV fleet and refueling back in the early 2000's, rather than Mike Griffin's bloated pork-friendly Constellation program with the Ares i and Ares V, the US might be back on the moon now.
I get the big rocket fetishism of Sea Dragon, but except for Bob Truax and people who keep rediscovering it, I don't think it ever has a reasonable shot of being built. It would have had to have had a dedicated nuclear aircraft carrier to provide both power, support, and LOX generation. So add on to that a standing army of a few thousand sailors. On a prime security asset that might have to leave at any moment's time because it's real job would have been being an aircraft carrier. It would have had to have been overbuilt to handle the pressure at the depths its most critical components would be sitting at. it would have to be built to loiter at such depths. Despite the fact that it's seen as a low tech brute force launcher, it would have had to have sensors to allow full checkout and telemetry at those depths, unless the aircraft carrier was also suppose to have a team of padrats trained as saturation divers handling things down below.
Not to mention the ecological disaster if that behemoth had a tank rupture and dumped its full content of RP1 into the equatorial sea. I don't think Sea Dragon ever had a chance. Like Nuclear Orion it's one of those ideas that kind of seems cool but really would not have worked out. While it was billed as a low cost way to heavy-lift, I suspect the true costs of developing and maintaining it would have dwarfed the most expensive launch systems ever in use such as Titan IV or STS.
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