this post was submitted on 03 May 2025
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You inadvertently argued against your point. It takes only a few kilograms of fissile material to generate the energy needed to escape the gravitation of the 6 billion trillion kilograms gravity of earth.
But not really because you only compared chemical energy to fission.
Yeah, but we have no useful way to channel the energy from nuclear fission into propulsion, so that's a moot point if we're talking in practical terms. At least, we don't without irradiating everything. My point was not that combustion-based propellants are energy efficient, merely that it takes a lot of energy to escape gravity, and while theoretically nuclear propulsion would be more efficient, in practice, burning shit is really the best we can do without giving someone cancer every time we want to put something in orbit, because gravity is a fuck.
You can do nuclear without irradiating everything Just like a nuclear plant doesn't irradiate everything. The only reason it isn't done is safety. Rockets fail too often.
The argument that gravity is in anyway a more powerful force than weak force (fission) or strong force (fusion) is wrong. The only thing gravity has is distance. The strong force is 100 trillion trillion trillion times stronger than gravity.