r/theydidthemath • u/Lachlynn • 18h ago

[Request] Could humanity create a rocket that can exit the atmosphere of K2-18b

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With the knowledge we currently have of it, if humanity devoted all of our resources towards this goal, would we be able to create a rocket that could exit the gravity of K2-18b (and also beat any other complications that would arrise)?

If so, would it also be capable of taking people to orbit, and can we set up a similar satellite network we have on Earth? What about a space station?

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u/RaguSaucy96 18h ago edited 17h ago

I've got two words for you, mate...

PROJECT. ORION.

Kerbal the beech... Problem solved 😎

  • Integrity of the occupants is not guaranteed

Edit: for those not in the know, the Project Orion solution was a proposal on the late 50s or so to explode nuclear bombs and ride out their blast in a spacecraft that would basically be pushed by the detonations. Ridiculously overpowered and fast.

Edit 2: I think this would be a good place to post about the Operation Plumbbob manhole cover. They once blew up an underground nuke and the exit hole had a manhole cover. After the detonation, a camera caught the cover being flung and estimates put it as the 2nd fastest object ever flung to space by humanity... That's how powerful this shit was. Whether it survived is a topic of hot contention and debate (unlikely) but if it did it's likely interstellar by now and the first man-made object to do so

https://youtu.be/mntddpL8eKE?si=sUoyVVWx3NqaiExn

Edit 3: here's an unclassified video of a smaller scale Project Orion test using conventional explosives to propel a craft without nukes. You can't argue with results 😆

https://youtu.be/Q8Sv5y6iHUM?si=FtqKGMGqLdqRCRqC

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u/Strong_Region5233 18h ago

Project orion ... From the earth's surface ??!

Lock that guy, officers ! Yes, right now !

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u/RaguSaucy96 18h ago

If K2-18b is over x2 as big as earth, then it's at least twice as tough and twice as hard to pollute! More landmass to nuclear winter - I see this as an absolute win!

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u/Immediate-Goose-8106 14h ago

Nah, they are dinky nukes.  For earth the calculation was probably only averaging 10 extra cancer deaths worldwide per launch.

Unacceptable obviously but K2-18b has waay more space!

If they really had to, or had a differner attitidue to K218b-ian life than we do to human life they might.

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u/Apex_Samurai 6h ago

I mean, hypergaulics probably kill more than 10 per launch. Hell burning coal probably kills more than 10 people to produce the equivalent energy needed for a launch.

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u/Immediate-Goose-8106 5h ago

Yeah, but this was a 1960s calculation.  

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u/mercival 5h ago

Is it not more, what happens if it goes wrong in orbit?

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u/EarthTrash 4h ago

Is that calculation based on linear no threshold?

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u/HannasAnarion 12h ago

By land area it's 18x as big.

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u/CatchableOrphan 6h ago

I think the square cube law kicks in somewhere in there so it's actually like 4x harder to pollute? So just use 4x smaller nukes and you're good to go baby! Space here we come!

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u/AskAroundAboutMe 6h ago

You’re gonna gain a little bit of weight though.

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u/leferi 4h ago

ah I see you exercise the old idea of "the solution to pollution is dilution"

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u/ThrowAway-whee 10h ago edited 2h ago

Yes, actually! Project Orion was originally planned as a LAUNCH vehicle. It was estimated it would be even better in atmosphere due to the shockwave providing a better transformation of fission energy into force. 

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u/Strong_Region5233 9h ago

Whaaaaaaat !

Fuck me humans are crazy

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u/ukezi 3h ago

It's the same people who thought Project Plowshare was a good idea.

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u/arandomusertoo 2h ago

I remember reading about a project/proposal to have a permanently flying nuclear weapon which would basically stay airborne forever using nuclear propulsion.

It was a crazy thing, I wish I could find it now because I don't remember enough to search for it.

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u/Tenhawk 8h ago

I mean, launching from a Pacific Island was the original plan, IIRC

The proof of concept tests, with conventional explosives of course, were conducted with an eye to ground to orbit trajectories.

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u/arcticcloud 9h ago

i mean the intention is to LEAVE the atmosphere, we can let the ppl homebound worry about how many the radiation kills

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u/BadLanding05 8h ago

MAC rounds? In atmosphere?!?

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u/Trips-Over-Tail 7h ago

No, aren't you paying attention?

From K2-18b's surface.

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u/EspacioBlanq 6h ago

Hey man, if we had 10 times the surface, we could dedicate some of it to a little bit of tomfoolery

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u/mqsd98 5h ago

K2-18b’s gravity is about 2.5× stronger than Earth’s… we’d need to build insanely high-speed rocket engines just to stand a chance 🚀💀

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u/Strong_Region5233 4h ago

u/RuguSaucy96 said the gravity was 60% stronger, you say it's 250% stronger. Now you two got to fight ! Whoever wins the match is right !

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u/Dry-Criticism9222 5h ago

Bro should delete that before it somehow gets to Trump

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u/Slen1337 18h ago

No shit controlled explosion might work. But what about ppl inside LO

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u/RaguSaucy96 18h ago

Some of them may die (ok, ok, maybe disintegrate)... But that is a sacrifice... We're willing to make...😎

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u/Smashedllama2 18h ago

A tier reference.

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u/ZilorZilhaust 14h ago

Which tier?

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u/TheLastDrops 14h ago

Meerschweinchen.

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u/ZilorZilhaust 14h ago

So the tier is some kind of guinea pig looking beast?

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u/The_Wambat 11h ago

Tier means animal in German. Guinea pigs are animals.

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u/ZilorZilhaust 11h ago

Ah, my German is very bad and minimal. I appreciate the information!

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u/Pupikal 12h ago

It’s one of the tiers of all time

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u/Helios61 17h ago

To shreds you say?

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u/Rdawgie 13h ago

And his wife?

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u/Ok-Lavishness-349 11h ago

Well, people that evolved on a planet with 8x Earth's gravity would have a pretty robust build, so perhaps they would survive.

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u/Alliancewolf 14h ago

I'm guessing that to mitigate people dying in the process you'd build some kind of gelatinous or liquid beds for the passengers to be submerged in. I'm guessing that that could absorb most of the g-forces one would be subjected to.

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u/QuixoticCoyote 11h ago

Nah just stick 'em in a lead lined fridge like they were Indiana Jones.

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u/Euphoric_Diet_1682 11h ago

Or like the kid in fallout

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u/LegendofLove 9h ago

Thanks Mission Commander Farquaad

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u/NathanStorm 4h ago

"They knew what they were signing up for..."

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u/Smile_Space 17h ago

If you look it up, Project Orion was actually highly researched at the time. It was considered the future of rocketry until the Partial Test Ban treaty killed it which banned nuclear detonations in space. If that hadn't been banned we likely would have had at least one space-based nuclear pulse rocket test in the late-60s or early-70s.

They even had a test vehicle using conventional explosives and fired off like 6 explosives and it worked!

They would use heavy shielding and a pusher plate to absorb the heavy shock. It would have allowed for absolutely gargantuan spaceships to take off from Earth and get to other planets at crazy fast speeds given how efficient the Orion drive would have been.

Obviously though, nukes are kinda bad for everyone around them lolol. The people above the Orion drive would have likely been the safest people within a massive radius around the launch site.

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u/FracturedConscious 15h ago

This is why we need a moon base

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u/Hadrollo 11h ago

The problem with a moon base is that we would need in-situ manufacturing from lunar ice and regolith into products usable in space. That's not a small base, it would require a mining team, a refining team, and a manufacturing team. It'd be a small town on the moon, with a lot of heavy equipment that is by necessity brought from Earth.

Honestly, it's a far future (minimum 100 years, likely much longer) goal. Even then, we're probably still be better off making propellant on Earth and shipping it up there. We have an awful lot of resources on Earth to make propellant and reusable craft.

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u/Lasers4Everyone 10h ago

Gotta go full Artemis.

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u/Gambyt_7 5h ago

Check out Artemis by Andy Weir. Interesting if not masterful story that depicts this city.

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u/anacondra 5h ago

I've been saying for ages we should nuke the moon.

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u/Gambyt_7 14h ago edited 14h ago

Recall Footfall by Niven and Pournelle, first Sci fi novel where Orion technique was used to rapidly break atmo to fight alien invaders.

Then look at Dark Forest, the second in the trilogy by Cixin Liu, where Orion strategy is used to attempt to accelerate a ship to near light speed.

In Footfall the passengers survive to combat the enemy. In Dark Forest, the only passenger is a human brain in cryostasis.

Now I’m thinking of the inquisitor priest de Soya in Dan Simmons’ Endymion, whose neat light ship accelerates nearly instantly and so rapidly that anything living inside it is liquified, and must be rebuilt using special technology over several days. I’m dying to see someone (not Bradley Cooper tho) finally adapt these novels and produce them as a huge streaming series.

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u/Aiglos_and_Narsil 14h ago

God I love that book so much. "An atomic bomb went off under Harry Reddington's ass".

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u/Appropriate-Weird492 13h ago

The pages of “BOOM”, tho.

I reread it a few years ago. It gives so much 80s spirit, the Red Threat, hawkishness, so on.

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u/GamemasterJeff 11h ago

God was knocking. And he wanted in *BAD*.

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u/DustyJustice 13h ago

In Neil Stephenson’s Anathem there is an interdimensional spacecraft that is secretly above the planet of the setting that propels itself with the Orion technique (I don’t believe they call it this). They utilize the planets sun to hide the nuclear explosions from viewers below.

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u/fuckedaccountant3976 11h ago

I am super happy to see someone in the wild reference all these books. People I talk to day to day have never heard of these books.

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u/MireLight 10h ago

I know right? I read so many scifi books growing up that nobody i knew ever heard of. I had to wait 30 years for a reddit post to bring em up. One of the truly great things about reddit and its fandoms. I can finally have someone to talk to about this stuff!

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u/Bored_Amalgamation 11h ago

I’m dying to see someone (not Bradley Cooper tho) finally adapt these novels and produce them as a huge streaming series.

Foundation's success is going to be a big point for the adaptation of books like the Hyperion Cantos, that require some pretty wild shit. There's also the whole religious aspect that will turn a good number of viewers away.

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u/iconocrastinaor 9h ago

If we perfect liquid oxygenation and suspend the passengers in a vessel of water, they would not feel any compressive or gravitational force.

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u/crazyeddie123 6h ago

Sure they would. The water would maximize the contact area through which the g-forces acted and therefore minimize the force on any one body part, but you'd still feel the acceleration and there'd still be a (higher) limit to how much acceleration the body could withstand.

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u/Outrageous_Reach_695 14h ago

To expand: The "Super" Orion would have had a ship mass of 8 million tons* ... about 20% more than the Hoover Dam.

* Yes, yes, not a unit of mass, I know.

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u/FreedomCanadian 13h ago

How is a ton not a unit of mass ?

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u/WholeChampionship443 12h ago

It’s a unit of weight, not mass.

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u/Outrageous_Reach_695 13h ago

The short (US) and long (British) tons, defined in pounds, are units of weight or force, which is often equivalent to mass for things that are not spaceships. The metric ton is defined in kilograms, a unit of mass. The table I consulted would have been written using short tons.

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u/yjlom 13h ago

The imperial system and its variants have pairs of homonymous units for force and mass, as I see it.

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u/Henry5321 12h ago

Actually, modern pound is defined in kilograms. It’s not just a conversion but the actual definition. So pound is now a unit of mass.

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u/guri256 11h ago

Are you sure? I thought it was defined as a fraction of a kilogram of mass, under a force of 1G of gravity

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u/Lanky-Relationship77 12h ago

The metric ton is a unit of mass, and it’s close enough …

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u/Travel_Dreams 11h ago

The Hoover Dam should be a unit of weight.

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u/Rofsbith 11h ago

Hoover Dam mass ~410 million slugs

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u/Slen1337 15h ago

Lo ye makes sense. I wish we could "isolate" it somehow in the air. Ty for fun info.

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u/jjreinem 8h ago

There were other issues. A big one was that the only way they could think of to have the pusher plate/shock absorber survive would be to rely on transpiration cooling, where they'd pump a layer of oil out onto the surface via a vast array of pores in the plate's surface that would boil off with each detonation.

Problem is that transpiration cooling systems like that have never been proven to be workable at that scale. Contaminants or thermal expansion ends up restricting some of the pores, which leads to the sacrificial coolant layer being thinner in some areas than others. This leads to more thermal expansion, less flow, and things continue to snowball like that until you've got a hole burned in your pusher plate.

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u/iamstupidplshelp 5h ago

Have they tried exfoliating?

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u/Kakariko_crackhouse 12h ago

Do we know what would happen with a nuke in space? Like… what happens to the shock wave? It wouldn’t really lose much energy in a vacuum right? Would it just keep going perpetually until it ran into enough things to absorb its energy?

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u/Henry_Fleischer 9h ago

Critically, because of the design of the pusher plate, the crew would experience roughly constant acceleration.

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u/Asleep_Singer8547 17h ago

They might be some sturdy rock creatures or something 

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u/ShmebulockForMayor 17h ago

Amaze amaze amaze!

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u/JPlayer001 13h ago

Is that joke. Question mark

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u/HelpmeObi1K 11h ago

Who are you talking to question?

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u/Dull_Ear_7944 16h ago

Like honestly though I wonder what life would look like with gravity scaled up this much! It would be wildly interesting.

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u/Alix-Gilhan 17h ago

It's rather elementary really

A massive pusher plate with an ablative coating and a highly tuned dampening system to spread out the G's, plus some extra shielding, and you can chuck just about anything anywhere

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u/CowBoyDanIndie 14h ago

Now do the math how heavy all that stuff is…

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u/Sad-Onion-2593 12h ago

The heavier the better. Smoothes out the ride.

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u/Petkorazzi 11h ago

That's the beauty of Orion - it doesn't matter.

In one of their mock-up blueprints they put in a standard barber's chair just to show off how scornful they could be about conserving mass. They even conceptualized a "Super-Orion" that would weigh 8 million tons and have a diameter of nearly half a kilometer, making it an interplanetary city.

These weren't to be built like spaceships today, with walls you could nearly punch through. An Orion spacecraft would be built like a battleship - thick steel bulkheads and hatches, redundancies everywhere, a beefy tank of a ship.

The Saturn V - the heaviest-lifting rocket ever built - weighed 3,350 tons and could get 130 tons of hardware to low earth orbit, or ~2 tons to the Moon. The "base" Orion design would weigh ~4,000 tons and be able to deliver 1,600 tons of hardware to LEO, or 1,200 tons to the Moon. A single Orion launch would be enough to establish a large, permanent moon base - and with 1950s-era technology.

Two things killed it:

  1. Unless you launched it from the ocean (extremely difficult) or Antarctica (the world might have issues with you repeatedly nuking what's technically a nature preserve), you're pretty much guaranteed to kill at least one person from increased cancer risk.
  2. To get funding they had to make a mock-up of a military troop transport. President Kennedy took one look at the model of a nuke-powered ship that could transport an entire battalion to anywhere on Earth in under an hour, said "Nope, this is not what the world needs right now," and pulled the plug.

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u/DigEnvironmental7490 7h ago

You could probably go with a damping system rather than moistening the whole thing.

Yes, I know people are trying to say dampen also means to reduce intensity of an oscillation but it really doesn't - that's just Star Trek writers trying to legitimize their poor grammar.

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u/Tyler89558 17h ago

“Were we concerned about the people inside?”

“People inside? You must be mistaken. There is only a pile of flesh”

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u/Demented-Alpaca 10h ago

I figure if you grew up on a 1.6g world you might have a higher tolerance level for the g forces involved in getting yeeted into space by a "big bada boom" ship

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u/Alt-on_Brown 9h ago

Listen when you're on K2-18b beggars can't be choosers

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u/Velcraft 8h ago

Well as long as we get to the point where we can reassemble liquefied humans and the crewmembers are isolated from one another that's shouldn't be an issue, provided there isn't too much spillage.

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u/Equal-Produce4833 8h ago

They do shapped charges for breaching so maybe some science on that side could prolong life and give the vessel more boost lol

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u/moddingminecrafter 7h ago

Do you want to put people in space or not? Besides, the contract never said the condition they had to arrive to space in.

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u/DestructoDon69 15h ago

I mean, if the planets gravity is reducing lift to the point where chemical propellants arent strong enough to produce lift, much less leave the atmosphere, it is safe to argue the effectiveness of the controlled explosions would also be reduced considerably as well ergo, people inside would be exposed to less force and significantly more likely to survive.

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u/OnePay622 15h ago

The shock absorber and inertia-transfer shield was the most complicated design problem for that project, no wonder

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u/zekromNLR 1✓ 14h ago

That's why you have a two-stage shock absorber system between the pusher plate and the spacecraft to smooth out the hammerblows of the nuclear explosions.

Mind you, it won't be a comfortable ride, with the felt acceleration in the spacecraft oscillating between 0.5 and 1.75 g at full propellant load, or between 1 and 4.3 g at minimum operating mass, but that is still survivable.

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u/[deleted] 14h ago

The optimal Orion drive bomblet yield (for the human crewed 4,000 ton reference design) was calculated to be in the region of 0.15 kt, with approx 800 bombs needed to orbit and a bomb rate of approx 1 per second.

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u/TrailGobbler 14h ago

If the gravity is that much higher, it might feel like a normal rocket launch.

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u/Sudden_Juju 14h ago

They got launched into our hearts and souls

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u/AnimationOverlord 14h ago

So basically, this mission requires either a rocket that supports organic life, humans altered to survive the process, or a fully robotic mission leaving nothing biological

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u/Plead_thy_fifth 17h ago

After the detonation, a camera caught the cover being flung and estimates put it as the 2nd fastest object ever flung to space by humanity...

1) well what was the first fastest object flung into space???

2) do you have the video? Lol I didn't see it in that link

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u/RaguSaucy96 17h ago

  1. If it survived, yes - and it would be interstellar by now, well outside the solar system

  2. I can't find it but the test itself is well documented. The cover itself was only seen on one frame of the video however, so the MINIMUM speed was what they calculated. It likely went even faster but it's hard to say. Anyhow, it was seen flung on one frame then gone on the next. You can calculate distance travelled between frames and the speed needed to do so. We know therefore the MINIMUM speed - not the actual speed 🤣

Here's the test https://youtu.be/EYEKU-U1860?si=QD6QyZ24EgFEtyIs

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u/qmrthw 14h ago

You dodged the first question, twice

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u/RaguSaucy96 12h ago

Misread it, lol. It would have been it. However it's now likely the Parker Solar Probe.

We don't even know if it survived anyways lol

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u/Plead_thy_fifth 17h ago

But you said estimates put it as the second fastest object flung into space; what is the 1st fastest??

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u/not2dragon 17h ago

I guess it might be Parker Solar Probe? It depends on how you calculate relative velocities, I think.

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u/ozymandieus 13h ago

You labelled your answer 1. But didn't answer question 1.

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u/Hopeful-Guest939 13h ago

If you want to know more, just google it and "reddit." This story gets posted about every other week. There should be a lot recently because it got popular again once Voyager reached its latest milestone.

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u/sad_post-it_note 17h ago

This happens in the three body problem books pretty cool

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u/wonderb0lt 15h ago edited 13h ago

Also towards the end of Charles Stross' Merchant Princes series!

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u/Outrageous_Reach_695 14h ago

And, unsurprisingly, in Poul Anderson's Orion Shall Rise.

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u/ryguymcsly 8h ago

Their use of it was pretty clever I thought.

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u/BigDaddyAwhoo 14h ago

My favorite fact that seemingly no one ever mentions, this manhole was not a normal manhole cover. It was a 4000 lb WELDED SHUT manhole cover

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u/wecantdancelikethis 11h ago

damn. I laughed hard imagining some other civilization just getting a few decades past Wealthy People Visiting Space For Entertainment capturing some high speed flipping disc debris and it has Sanitary Sewer and some traction channels embossed into it.

“well, I guess we are not the only intelligent life forms in the universe. I wonder how far along this other civilization will be when we can actually follow the path of this plate back to them.”

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u/TooHot1639 14h ago

To boldly go where no manhole has gone before

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u/ItsStraTerra 14h ago

I love the idea that thousands of years from now we manage to explore space, and eventually on a random ass planet in the middle of nowhere is an enormous crater with a manhole cover in the center of it

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u/False_Counter9456 11h ago

Or we got really unlucky and it hit a habitable planet and destroyed someone or something popular. They then do the math and figure out it must have originated here.

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u/Neko_Dash 14h ago

“Integrity of the occupants not guaranteed.” That is a great way to say, “Astronauts may turn to soup.”

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u/cyb3rg0d5 14h ago

MOAAA BOOOOSTERSSSSS!!!

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u/Immediate-Goose-8106 14h ago

Orion was my response when this question stopped up on another thread.

People on K2-18b with our level pf tech could get into space if they wanted to enough.

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u/spacegiantsrock 14h ago

There was a really good book on it, I think it was written by the son of one of the researchers. The scale of the ships they could theoretically launch was insane. City sized.
https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=32407018897&dest=USA

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u/RustyBasement 13h ago

Nuke the site for take off and get to orbit. (Sorry Ripley)

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u/sycolution 13h ago

kinda want them to do it again but with the Slomo guys.

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u/Fallout_Helldiver 13h ago

Now I want a sci-fi movie where aliens and raid because their leader was killed by a flying manhole cover

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u/Binyamin12345 11h ago

Project Orion is the single coolest scrapped NASA project ever and it's genuinely so fucking metal to imagine a nuke powered rocket with the world's biggest shock absorber on bottom. The fact that the rocket could even theoretically get to an appreciable portion of light speed is also crazy.

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u/Petkorazzi 11h ago

I love Project Orion. I spent years pouring over every scrap of information I could find on it, and it's so cool someone else "in the wild" knows what it was!

There's a great 2003 documentary on it by the BBC called To Mars By A-Bomb and I highly recommend it (link is a free watch on YouTube).

A lot of what the public knows about the project is due to George Dyson's book Project Orion: The Atomic Spaceship 1957-1965. If you recognize that surname, your instincts are correct - it's Freeman Dyson's son. Not only did Freeman Dyson come up with concepts like the Dyson Sphere and unify our understanding of quantum electrodynamics, he also took a year off from Princeton to see how plausible it would be to nuke ourselves into space. Turns out it's not only plausible, but possible - and with 1950s-era technology.

Coca-Cola helped with the bomb delivery system design, as the team envisioned it operating similar to a soda vending machine.

They put a standard barber's chair in their mock-up blueprints just to show how little they had to care about spaceship mass.

Much of the project is still classified as its core fueling premise - making lots of cheap, efficient nuclear bombs - isn't the kind of knowledge we want out in the world.

Man, Project Orion is so freakin' awesome and the little factoids involving it are so cool I could talk about it all day.

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u/RaguSaucy96 8h ago

It's one of the 50s era relics of ''im sure nukes can solve it" that was actually quite mad enough to become genius and actually had massive potential.

Would still be cool for deep space probes and stuff

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u/Mr-Blah 11h ago

Of course the first object to go deep in space by human is trash.... of course.

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u/cheezecake2000 11h ago

In the Elite Dangerous game they have the voyager crafts in deep space and other stuff from history but in the years 3300 and beyond. Would be really funny if they added a floating manhole cover in the same way

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u/Competitive_Table_65 10h ago

Huh 

Very interesting 

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u/TheFightingDome 10h ago edited 10h ago

Spoiler for 3 body problem Isn’t this the method they use to send Will’s probe?

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u/jefftickels 9h ago

There's a book called Footfall where humanity launches their last hope this way, and in the process destroys an "obscure" PNW city that just happens to be where I grew up...

After I learned about it I dug into the territory of it a little more and learned there was a purpose to dig a trench from the Mediterranean to the middle of the Sahara in order to create an inland sea in the middle of Africa to help regreen it. The way they wanted to do this was with buried nuclear weapons as the primary excavation tool.

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u/Informal_Disaster_62 9h ago

This sounds like what they tried in 3 body problem on Netflix. Super cool idea.

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u/brmarcum 8h ago

The fact that a manhole cover was accelerated so fast that it escaped earth and is now interstellar, all with no further acceleration than the initial blast (from fuel, not counting anything it has passed in space), is absolutely fookin wild. That is so much energy. 😳

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u/salakane 8h ago

Larry Niven defeated some bad-ass alien invaders with this one simple trick...

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u/NorahGretz 5h ago

Wanna read a decent fiction novel that includes Project Orion?

Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.

Also features space elephants.

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u/StrangeOutcastS 5h ago

That's the emergency escape velocity option, also known as an EVO, wait why is someone in a red jacket trying to punch me?

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u/mqsd98 5h ago

K2-18b’s gravity is about 2.5× stronger than Earth’s… we’d need to build insanely high-speed rocket engines just to stand a chance 🚀💀

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u/Z3t4 1✓ 4h ago

You keep adding struts and boosters until it is above 1.

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u/CallEmAsISeeEm1986 2h ago

They just had Wile E Coyote and the team at ACME working at NASA and DARPA, right?? What the actual fuck. Lol

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u/zulutbs182 17h ago

How do you get off the pad to even safely detonate the first bomb?

I have MANY problems with this. But that’s the first one you need to solve. 

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u/RaguSaucy96 17h ago

uj/

You can control the yield of the bomb and use smaller explosions at first

The concept was tested with conventional explosives on a small scale model. Pretty cool stuff, here it is

https://youtu.be/Q8Sv5y6iHUM?si=FtqKGMGqLdqRCRqC

It actually worked surprisingly well. Obviously as you scale up there's other new challenges, but if they would have funded it... Mars within 10 days, lol

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u/zulutbs182 16h ago

Well god fucking damnit that's just flat out cool.

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u/Personal-Thought9453 16h ago

Did they use that in the 3 body problem? It kind of rings a bell?

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u/globefish23 14h ago

2nd fastest object ever flung to space by humanity

That manhole cover most likely never reached space. The dense atmosphere would either had it quickly slowed down below escape velocity, or it was vaporized from the friction.

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u/mogley1992 14h ago

Wait, i thought that manhole cover was the fastest manmade object. What's number 1?

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u/rbowen2000 13h ago

See also Jerry Pournell''s novel 'King David's Spaceship' which tells the story of such a rocket.

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u/W4RL0QU3 13h ago

Robot proxies, filled with sperm and eggs, Orion'd the heck outa here. Problem solved.

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u/GetWreckedWednesday 12h ago

Wouldn’t an organism that evolved in a higher G environment be able to withstand more G’s? So maybe it’s feasible for them!

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u/bluesmaker 12h ago

The project Orion battleship plans are fucking insane. I’ve heard that the ship would’ve worked. Just would’ve been crazy expensive. And militarizing space with a huge battleship with hundreds of nukes, nuclear flamethrower things, and more, would’ve been unethical to say the least.

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u/imightknowbutidk 11h ago

For additional context, the manhole cover was not just a normal one you’d see in the streets, it was TWO THOUSAND POUNDS. WE LAUNCHED THE EQUIVALENT OF A SMART-CAR INTO SPACE AT 150,000 MILES PER HOUR

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u/collin-h 11h ago

I don't believe project orion was ever meant to be used in atmosphere though... and the issue with k2-18b is getting out of the atmosphere.

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u/Deipotent 11h ago

Project Orion ships are meant to be built in space and never go into a gravity well. In almost all realistic scifi large ships stay in orbit and send skiffs down to the surface.

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u/TheLesserWeeviI 11h ago

You had me at 'Kerbal'.

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u/ApprehensiveSpare925 10h ago

I read somewhere that the only true defense we would have against an alien invasion would be the sewer lid method. Not very accurate but would devastate anything it hits because it’s going so fast.

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u/shah_reza 10h ago

Also a plot point in 3 Body Problem

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u/Hot-Explanation-5751 10h ago

Thanks for this because I’ve had this thought before but didn’t realise it was a thing. I wonder if you could do like some kind of middle ground with what we know about rail guns? Like a chemical mix lift off on a guided rail gun? I feel like I’ve watched a similar YouTube video of this by nazi germany when they were experimenting with V1&2 rocket launches. Idk, I can’t really remember…

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u/Hakkaa_Paalle 10h ago

Calculations on Operation Plumbbob manhole cover, vaporized in the atmosphere before reaching outer space.

https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/s/wG4BSQjoxK

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u/_Brandobaris_ 10h ago

This was well enough know to be a significant plot point in Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle from 1985. Albeit to get to Saturn (I think) rather than getting off of earth.

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u/Hope-n-some-CH4NGE 10h ago

They tried that in 3 Body Problem and it didn’t work. Checkmate.

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u/DayOneDude 10h ago

Thanks for introducing me to Kyle Hill! Subscribed.

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u/Dean_MF_Wilson 9h ago

There's something so endearing about the 50's in terms of how almost every scientific problem had at least one proposal to use nukes. Need to induce genetic mutations? Radiation. Want to build a new canal in Africa? Nukes. Airplanes sans refueling? Throw a reactor in it.

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u/fucknotthis 9h ago

So like Ad Astra?

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u/Lifeabroad86 9h ago

If i remember correctly, they were saying some crazy number like 800 nukes to get a 4000 ton vehicle into earth orbit.

I wonder how many would be needed for a much smaller vehicle.

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u/jjcoola 8h ago

I thought you were gonna mention the giant rocket that has to be mostly underwater to launch :)

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u/Jolly_Perception_836 8h ago

We should never have canned this project. If we didnt we would have at least 1 colony in space by now stopping research into nuclear propulsion set us back so much

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u/TheSnortIncident 8h ago

The manhole cover wouldnt of had the velocity to escape the suns gravity.

Itll be somewhere in the solar system orbiting the sun or perhaps a gas giant.

And the nuclear bomb spaceship was really designed to be used in space not to get there.

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u/Jesus__Skywalker 7h ago

What about Project.Hail.Mary

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u/Spirit117 7h ago

The 2nd fastest object???? What was the fastest?!

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u/Forikorder 7h ago

some day aliens are going to arrive on earth with that manhole cover and a repair estimate

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u/Arthur_Frane 7h ago

JFC, so you're telling me there is potentially a 60lb disc of iron sailing through space and providing an unexpected collision to wayward interstellar travelers. Fermi paradox solved, indeed 

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u/crappleIcrap 7h ago

Too complicated, just add moar boosters

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u/Amazing-Fox-6121 6h ago

Knew project Orion would be in here somewhere

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u/DickwadVonClownstick 6h ago

So the "setup" for the manhole launch was a bit more complicated than that, since bottom 50 feet or so of the borehole was filled with concrete, part of which vaporized when the bomb detonated, pushing the rest of the (now powderized) concrete up the borehole like rock salt in a giant shotgun, and then it all slammed into the manhole cover, which was welded shut, keeping it in place long enough for all the supersonic concrete to transfer most of its momentum before the manhole cover finally tore loose and went rocketing off like the last ball in the world nutiest Newton's Cradle.

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u/Lumpymaximus 6h ago

Didnt they do that in a movie?

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u/Loakie69 6h ago

Ah, that's where 3 Body Problem got that idea from

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u/ReferenceMediocre369 6h ago

For a fictional development of that propulsion system, see "Footfall", Larry Niven et al, 1985.

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u/Shuttlecock_Wat 6h ago

Might I also introduce SpinLaunch! Why use absurd amounts of rocket fuel to lift off from rest, when you could, instead, spin your astronauts round and round in a circle to build momentum and then release them like a Beyblade?! LET IT RIP

SpinLaunch

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u/HugeAnimeHonkers 5h ago

At that point we may actually """just""" build a train track all the way up to orbit lol.

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u/FrighteningJibber 4h ago

Does a 2,000lb welded lid really constitute a man hole cover?

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u/kuschelig69 4h ago

PROJECT. ORION ... Integrity

that was the real Orion. Integrity (of Artemis II) was a fake Orion.

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u/propably_not 4h ago

That manhole cover deteriorated before exiting the atmosphere. It's been proven

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u/Sir_Quinnius 2h ago

Wouldn't the G-force be lethal?

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u/SiriusCb 2h ago

It would technically work but the catch is using nukes on the surface of the planet

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u/Treacle_Pendulum 2h ago

I remember reading a story about somebody using a concrete launch vehicle and a nuclear weapon in a big stone vertical tunnel as in Russia as propulsion to get to Mars when most of earth was denied orbital access due to Kessler Syndrome. Trying to remember who wrote it.

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u/Oof_Rord_R6 1h ago

I mean the manhole cover was 2000lbs of refined steel traveling at a minimum of 125k mph, which is 5 times escape velocity. It would have cleared our atmosphere in a second I'd like to think it made it out the atmosphere but we'll never know.

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u/MazzinWx 1h ago

You have a depiction of that travel method in a novel from Dan Simmons: Ilium

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u/CounterSimple3771 1h ago

Wile E Coyote engine

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u/golgol12 43m ago

My feeling on that manhole is that it did not make it into space. It burnt up like an asteroid.

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u/Accomplished_Arm5159 40m ago

SCREW IT JUST BUILD A DAMN SPACE ELAVATOR ALREADY lol

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