You have to wonder if Putin’s ass is jealous of the shit his mouth spews.
How would that work? Nuclear reactors are, AFAIK, not capable of very much beyond getting extremely hot.
Would that heat be used to cause rapid expansion of, for example, a lightweight solid into its gaseous form for propulsion?
Or is there something new up Putin’s short sleeves.
I’m aware that the US proposed (and perhaps tested) the use of continuous, rhythmic nuclear bombs as a method of propulsion for space flight, but abandoned it as too erratic.
Heating up substances using a nuclear reactor in order to produce propulsion has been demonstrated before successfully, usually with liquid hydrogen, as it offers the best specific impulse, see for example the US NERVA project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA), which was a great success, but sadly abandoned anyway, and the Soviet RD-0410 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RD-0410). But from what I can find this new Russian weapon is a subsonic cruise missile, which is most likely closer to something like the old US Project Pluto engine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto) which just pumps air through a nuclear reactor to heat it, which then cools the reactor and provides trust. Honestly, we don’t know nearly enough about this new Russian weapon to be able to say how exactly it works, but it is probably not as groundbreaking as people might think, since all the projects I have mentioned above date back quite a while back.
We can already shoot their faster missiles out of the sky fairly reliably. 🤷♀️
I don’t get the point of it tho? You can already make missiles that go much faster and reach the entire globe. What usecase does this have? I highly doubt it’s gonna be cheaper than a regular rocket engine.
