[AR] Re: DARPA responsive launch challenge
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2018 15:37:21 -0400 (EDT)
On Tue, 24 Apr 2018, Uwe Klein wrote:
...100 million tons of conventional explosive. He presumably
calculated that from the published information on fission. It's
roughly a factor of 2 too high for his mass of U-235 -- he may have
confused total energy release with energy per fission fragment, or
worked from a source which did -- but that aside, it's about right.
A 1940 story. :-)
Yep. People think of fission as something that burst on the world in
August 1945 with the atom bombs, but it was discovered early in 1939 by
Germans (Hahn and Strassmann's experimental work was done in late 1938,
but they couldn't make sense of it until they consulted Meitner and
Frisch, who realized what it must mean), and there was great excitement
about it in physics and chemistry circles for a little while, until people
gradually stopped publishing due to wartime secrecy. The SF community in
particular was very much aware of it.
"May we hope that attempts to release the unimaginable energy locked in
uranium atoms, on a useful scale, remain complete and unmitigated failures
until such time as the family fight in Europe is concluded?"
-- John W. Campbell, Astounding Science Fiction, Nov. 1939 (p. 78)
then my impression is that that the story was more about risk, risk
management and his connections drawn to "General Semantics"!?
Well, yes. The physics etc. of the story don't hold up very well under
modern inspection, but it still works as a story...
Henry
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