>>12482384This is Ulam's nuclear pulse propulsion, that is, H-bombs as a rocket propellant. The plasma and x-rays of an H-bomb explosion is an incredible rocket, due to the enormous temperatures and ablation pressures, and this impulse can be concentrated and directed onto a large plate.
This design is so much more efficient than other designs that there is no comparison. It's like winding up a car with a spring versus filling it with gas. There is no other way to achieve such a huge amount of thrust cheaply.
The drawback to this is that the bombs generate a certain amount of atmospheric fallout on takeoff. This is some hundreds of low-yeild atmospheric atomic explosions, and even with the cleanest designs, it will not be a negligible amount of pollution. With research, it might be possible to reduce the fallout levels, this research was not popular during the cold war, small clean nuclear bombs made nuclear war more likely. There is probably a potential for bombs that produce largely short half-life fallout of elements which are not likely to concentrate in living things. The total fallout should be less than recent accidental disasters, but it will be comparable.
If you allow a government to build such a rocket, then you can just build the base on Earth, make it a 10,000 ton rocket, and blast the whole thing to Mars, then return the folks that go along on a smaller Orion rocket included in the base, that they wheel far away and blast off in. There is really none of the standard weight limitations here, the rockets are easier to engineer the bigger they get, with the caveat that the larger the rocket the greater the total cumulative fallout on takeoff.
This is so much cheaper than any other method (at least, any other method that fully shields the astronauts from radiation during the journey). There probably are no other realistic methods, this is a difficult problem, and the number of solutions to difficult problems is usually either exactly 0 or exactly 1.
