>>11123544Honestly there are two good futures for NASA starting from around the mid 1970s:
1. abandon super heavy lift/shuttle/re-usability and basically just try to iterate on the Saturn IB with a rocket that wasn't a massive pile of pork and do capsules and small lifting body tests to LEO while expanding Skylab
2. risk cancellation and go hard in the fucking paint with the balls-out fully reusable two-stage to orbit OG dolphin sex shuttles
instead they tried to play the politics game and ended up in the bad future for fifty years
>>11123554SLAM's radioactive exhaust was the design failing, it wasn't designed to do that
a modern version wouldn't have that issue, and if they matured it more they would have fixed it as well
>>11123554holy shit that's exactly what I was imagining, thank you, saved
that sort of nuclear turbojet might be useful for missions to explore a few of the Jovian and Saturnian moons but otherwise isn't that great
if you're already coming in from orbit, then a SLAM type nuclear thermal ramjet is superior on Venus (due to the hurricane force winds above the cloud tops) and Mars (due to ramjets working better than turbojets in the thin air and you've got to go balls to the wall to get enough lift in the thin atmosphere anyway)
>>11123567weapons like SKYFALL and Project Pluto are literally doomsday weapons
