Nuclear photonic rocket  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search  In a nuclear photonic rocket, a
nuclear reactor would generate such high temperatures that the
blackbody radiation from the reactor would provide significant
thrust. The disadvantage is that it takes a lot of power to
generate a small amount of thrust this way, so acceleration is
very slow. The photon radiators would most likely be constructed
using graphite or tungsten. Photonic rockets are technologically
feasible, but rather impractical with current technology.
Energy requirements and comparisons[edit]  The power per thrust
required for a perfectly collimated output beam is 300 MW/N
(half this if it can be reflected off the craft); very high
energy density power sources would be required to provide
reasonable thrust without unreasonable weight. The specific
impulse of a photonic rocket is harder to define, since the
output has no (rest) mass and is not expended fuel; if we take
the momentum per inertia of the photo