
Project Pluto - llambda
http://www.merkle.com/pluto/pluto.html
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flyinglizard
50's-60's in the US Military Industrial Complex seem like one hell of a
period. Just think of the SR-71, first Keyhole satellites, Apollo - so much
innovation over a couple of decades. It just seemed like an era with no
imposed limits, a technological free for all where anything is justified in
the name of beating the commies.

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InclinedPlane
Just remember that such work during the Cold War came at a price. Talented
engineers were sucked up into the machinery of the Cold War and put to use
designing and building ICBMs, cruise missiles, nuclear weapons, fighter
planes, and so forth. But on the other hand, that had a huge opportunity cost
because it meant those people weren't working on other things. And while we
still ended up with a lot of amazing civilian inventions in that time, some
even due to spinoffs from Cold War technology, we should have no illusions
that we probably missed out on others.

Rocket technology for one. It was almost impossible for "startups" to work on
orbital launchers during the Cold War, for obvious geopolitical reasons. Much
of our launch vehicle technology was based off of ICBM work, but there are
some problems with that, since launch vehicles need to be considerably more
reliable even than a missile designed to carry nuclear weapons. More so, the
design of strategic weapons on the scale of importance of ICBMs tends to leave
issues of cost by the wayside, whereas the same is not true for commercial
launchers. Since the end of the Cold War there's been a flourishing of space-
based startups, many of them seeing a considerable amount of success lately
(SpaceX, Orbital Sciences, XCOR, Blue Origin, etc.) Potentially if the same
sort of business and geopolitical environment had existed in the 1960s it's
quite possible that we would have seen much faster advances in spaceflight
than we have seen historically.

An that's just one aspect, who knows what else would have happened if many of
the best engineering minds of a generation had not been lured (through
monetary reward, through prestige, through a sense of national duty) into
designing missiles and bombs.

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Cushman
Who was it that wrote that had the millions of lives and trillions of dollars
wasted in the World Wars been applied instead to peaceful pursuit of science,
we would easily have had a man on the moon by 1950?

Wishful thinking, of course, but man, what a thought.

~~~
cryptoz
Imagine if the Greeks and Romans had continued their libraries, science and
research 2000 years ago. If they hadn't fallen to Christianity and other
religions, I'd bet we'd have been a spacefaring species around year 500 or
1000 maybe.

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jatoben
Everyone here has read _A Colder War_ , right?
<http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm>

~~~
nnq
If Charles Stross would've had _at least half of Lovecraft's literary talent_
, it might have been an enjoyable reading. Anyway, it's a nice piece of sci-fi
work (though a bad piece of literature and not even very imaginative...).

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balakk
Holy shit. 500 megawatts? in a single missile? That seems to more than what
Nimitz class carriers produce(190MW). Or am I reading this wrong?

~~~
IvyMike
That _is_ crazy. But a quick couple of searches show that aircraft engine are
actually pretty amazingly powerful.

I did some googling, and numbers aren't usually supplied in MW, so there may
be some errors up ahead. (I'm hoping an expert in the field sees this and
corrects my work. :)

That being said, I think that the 747's power output is around 140MW; it
appears that the SR-71 is around the same at around 120MW; and the Boeing 777
is pushing 220MW.

~~~
Gravityloss
Rocket engines can produce gigawatts as jet power. Kerosene and liquid oxygen
is a very dense energy source. A jet engine is slightly bigger as it needs to
pump air which is not very dense, but it's still much less complex than a
power plant that has to generate electricity.

