Thanks for everyone following along! I spoke to some experts and feel comfortable sharing this document. Need to post in 2 posts because of the amount of photos! This document looks like it was filed away and never touched since it’s in beautiful condition and needs to be shared with the world! I still have ALOT more to go through but this one is really cool! Have to post in 2 because I’m only allowed 20 photos.
*if your just seeing this I posted the text from my original post below…sort of went viral, which I wasn’t expecting!
Hello fellow space enthusiasts,
I was hoping to get some more information on a recent find of mine. I’m an avid collector and reseller of all things historic. Especially space related.
The documents belonged to Thomas Szekely who holds the patent for a Nuclear propulsion apparatus with alternate reactor segments. Szekely was an engineer with GE working on the NERVA project. The documents include presentations on utilizing nuclear propulsion for a manned mission to Mars.
Of notable interest are nearly 300 pages of handwritten formulas and calculations used to build the nuclear propulsion technology and manned missions to Mars. (Not posting photos of these for confidentiality reasons)
I believe this information could provide valuable insight into the nuclear technology developed in the 60's and 70's to help us with a manned mission to Mars. I've attached some pictures for reference.
I would also think that scientists studying nuclear propulsion technology would probably be interested in the handwritten equations from the man who built and patented the nuclear propelled rocket.
https://www.reddit.com/gallery/1kk5fyq
8 Comments
Not sure posting a document with “confidential” markings is the best idea.
Thanks for sharing! This is great to get a look at the kinds if thinking that NASA and its contractors were doing back then.
Does anyone have any biography about the author, Thomas Székely?
It’s Intersting to me to see a Hungarian name on a document like this… Made me curious.
Where is the flea market that you keep finding these gems at?
this is amazing. it’s describing a nuclear reactor used to accelerate air as a means of propulsion to take off. i saw a part like this in a kerbal space program mod and thought it was absurd… it still is absurd but looks like it may have been theoretically feasible.
for sure if the rocket-plane crashed or exploded, it would leave radioactive wreckage, but i have no idea what the normal exhaust would be composed of. once the air thins out, it would use onboard hydrogen fuel, so i assume the exhaust there is just hydrogen and deuterium, but im not sure what comes out at sea level.
0.025 rem/hr crew dosage with capability to stay airborne for several days (at Mach 3), so 1.8 rem (assume whole body) for a three day mission?
Let me get this straight: we could have had passenger airliners powered by NUCLEAR REACTORS taking off and flying nonstop from London to Sydney, WITHOUT FOSSIL FUELS, and we had the math for this over SEVENTY YEARS AGO!?!?
How much did Big Oil pay to suppress this?
Dude!!! My Dad was an engineer on this project for a decade! There’s a really cool documentary shot back in the 60s about the project. I saw it a couple of years ago on the NASA channel on Dish Network