A list of links for the on the road posts yesterday.
About that last link. I came to the conclusion that you could send up ammonium carbonate and ammonium nitrate in solid form, and then easily decompose it into carbon dioxide and water. From there, you could manufacture methane/lox for a fuel depot. You'd have some other stuff too, and uses for that have to be found. Some of those things include ammonia, laughing gas, and excess water. It looks like in the end, there will be an excess of nitrogen. I haven't figured any way to use this for fuel, so if another way to use it cannot be found, it may have to be dumped overboard. The laughing gas is a oxidizer for a certain type of rocket engine, but that system doesn't impress me much. Maybe you can just break it down into nitrogen and oxygen and use it for breathable air.
About the link to mount the X-37/NTR rocket stack backwards. A clarification is in order. The X-37C will still point forward, so it will be mounted backwards on top of the rocket casing for the NTR. Now that that is cleared up, how do you get it pointed forward again? Two options: First do a docking procedure in which you back up into the rocket casing and lock it down. Or secondly, have the X-37C crawl and pivot on a device that is like a railroad on top of the rocket stack. In that second process, the docking procedure requires no piloting, or even an expense of fuel. It would entail using an electric motor to move the X-37C into the proper position while in space and while waiting for the NTR to light up. This should be done expeditiously, as there is no thrust during this time.
Finally, with respect to yesterday's on the road posts, it wasn't mentioned, but I had an idea to use the ammonia in the NTR. If you split off the nitrogen in the laughing gas, maybe you could use that in the NTR for reaction mass, but ammonia is out.
The big brainstorm there in using nitrogen as opposed to hydrogen ( once in orbit ), is that you can keep the NTR casing in space and fill it with liquid nitrogen for a trip elsewhere. Provided that the ISP is good enough and the NTR equipment can handle it, it could serve as an Earth Departure Stage ( EDS). The worry is that nitrogen may be reactive at high temperatures in the NTR and may be corrosive. If it isn't, then you could collect the stuff in quantity and use if for a reaction mass.
Since the NTR rocket casing is 288 cubic meters, the same volume could hold a whopping 232704 kg of liquid nitrogen. The NTR core could handle a lot more than just the 10 minutes or so of operation in order to get to orbit. In other words, as long as it doesn't corrode the core, the nitrogen could provide a lot of reaction mass for an NTR. Enough to go to the Moon or to Deimos. Now, that's a thought.
Update:
Methane is a possibility for a reaction mass in an NTR. Don't know how to calculate the ISP, but the mass possible in the tank is a considerable 121715 kg. If the ISP is no less than for burning methane with oxygen, we may have a winner for a mission to the Moon or Deimos. But to fully fill up a tank like this could take 40 missions. Yet, you couldn't beat the price. Imagine a trip to Deimos for less than a billion bucks round trip.
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