More Words, Deeper Hole

The proton micropile! I loved those guys! Sigh. Being, as they say, an advanced student in a rather backward school system, I got a lot of my 'science' from sf stories. Books like Leinsters' "Forgotten Planet", for example. It wasn't until much later that I actually started getting the real stuff - tip o' the hat to Asimov non-sf - and learning about the real problems with space flight. The proton micropile seemed to me at the tender age of eleven to be the way it would really happen, compact power source heating a large amount of cheap propellant (what could be cheaper than water?) Yeah, that was the real stuff, baby. It wasn't until a grade or two later that I learned about the extremely corrosive effects live steam tends to have machinery that I had to modify my sophisticated opinions.