At the beginning of the twentieth century, when the Curies refined the radioactive element radium, Tsiolkovsky, the father of Russian astronautics, predicted: "A one-ton rocket only needs a pinch of radium to break all gravitational ties with the solar system." ”

After the real appearance of human nuclear technology, it was used on the battlefield.

However, the use of nuclear energy has also really begun at that time, and nuclear power plants and nuclear-powered ships are also appearing more and more in the world.

And human exploration of space has also focused on nuclear power for a long time.

However, the nuclear contamination produced by the engines of nuclear-powered flying devices, especially nuclear fission engines, is extremely dangerous.

Nuclear fission can be applied to launch vehicles, and there is no problem at all with today's human mastery of nuclear energy technology.

However, nuclear fission is the driving force of the launch vehicle, and the large amount of nuclear pollution ejected will cause a huge disaster to the environment.

In particular, large rockets with a nuclear fission engine may produce radiation and contamination that will turn the launch center into a no-man's land.

And this pollution will also radiate to the sky and even the sky, which will produce a lot of problems for the human living environment. Good consequences.

So far, no country, no matter what it is, has not used nuclear fission reactors as a power source for large-scale far-flung rockets.

Nuclear fusion does not have the problem of environmental pollution and nuclear radiation, so if there is a mature launch vehicle nuclear power, it must be nuclear fusion technology.

This is also a key power research project of the Space Science and Technology Center.

The research project focuses on the development of a laboratory for the development of power systems for large space vehicles and launch vehicles, and on the test platform of this laboratory is a small and medium-sized nuclear fusion reactor.

Unlike previous research directions for microreactors, the test here is not to solve the complete precision control of the energy output, but to maximize the energy output as much as possible and release it quickly and instantaneously.

It is impossible for an aerospace vehicle to use a propeller as a power source, because there is no air to form a reaction force, so jet propulsion has become the focus of the test.

Nuclear fusion power is used to power the ramjet engine, which produces powerful thrust to replace the fuel required by the engine as the power core.

At present, this technology is also quite mature, but a large number of mature trials are still needed.

Compared with traditional fuel engines, nuclear fusion has too many advantages.

One of them is the problem of thrust, fuel engines have a very serious thrust problem, thrust is limited, so every time a launch vehicle is launched on the earth, it is necessary to find a suitable launch window, with the help of the earth's gravitational acceleration, so that the rocket can leave the earth smoothly.

So far, even the launch vehicles in the Red Alert base need to rely on the gravitational acceleration of the planet Earth to launch the launch vehicle smoothly.

But this method is just a helpless workaround, after all, the price of each launch vehicle is not cheap, and it is necessary to pursue a reasonable carrying capacity, so it can only be accelerated by the earth's gravity to achieve a larger carrying capacity.

However, this method is very time-consuming, and the launch routes that can be used are also limited.

If a nuclear-powered launch vehicle or a space shuttle is installed, there is no such problem, there is no need to use the gravitational acceleration of the planet, and there is no need to launch according to the route, and you can enter space from anywhere on the earth anytime, anywhere.

At present, the world's mature use of nuclear power, that is, nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines, all use nuclear fission reactors to propel propellers.

The same principle of nuclear power was also used in nuclear-powered aircraft during the Cold War, although in the end due to various technical factors, safety issues and needs, there were no nuclear-powered aircraft, but the reason is the same.

However, there is no air and no water as a medium for propulsion in space, so it is necessary to use jets as propulsion.

However, this propulsion method is also very simple, and the current nuclear power laboratory of the Space Science and Technology Center uses a large amount of heat energy generated by nuclear fusion, and then injects liquid hydrogen, which expands rapidly after heating, and then sprays out of the tail of the engine at high speed to generate thrust.

The current test is not a thrust test, but another kind of power test, which is a power test that is planned to be used for large aerospace vehicles.

At the center of the test site is a huge nuclear power reactor, which is larger than the molten salt reactors currently used in supercarriers.

When Fan Yize came over, he was testing the stable operation of the power system.

Different from traditional ship reactors, because the nuclear fusion engine directly generates power and needs to supplement propellant, the stability data of the reactor are very high.

The experimental site in front of us is a propulsion test platform to test the level of continuous advancement and maximum thrust of the nuclear fusion engine.

At present, the various propulsion data tests of the test have almost been completed, but the thrust has not yet met the requirements of the technical indicators.

According to the future development needs of the Red Guard Corps, the thrust of the nuclear fusion engine carried out by this laboratory of the Space Science and Technology Center needs to meet the needs of an aerospace aircraft carrier of more than 100,000 tons, which has the ability to quickly depart from the ground and enter the earth's low-earth orbit, and can meet the powerful power of the aerospace aircraft carrier with a speed close to the second cosmic speed.

This is an extremely high requirement, and it is very difficult to achieve this technical indicator, even for the technology owned by the base.

However, the commanding heights of future wars will no longer simply seize air supremacy, but the right to seize space supremacy.

Moreover, the future sixth-generation fighter is also endowed with the ability to freely enter and exit the earth and space, so it needs a nuclear-powered engine with excellent performance and fully mature technology.

Because the conventional power system simply cannot meet such requirements.

At the same time, extremely high requirements are also put forward for the thrust and related performance of nuclear-powered engines.

In particular, the power system of large air and space combat platforms will have more stringent requirements.

At present, the preparation of various technologies is still in the laboratory, and the current nuclear fusion engine project is a key experimental project to overcome these technologies.

Maybe the 10,000-meter-long space battleship in the future is still extremely far away, but the space vehicle with a length of several hundred meters is no longer completely impossible, and it may appear soon.