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True, I ignored those since they're not practical to push payloads to Mars or beyond. Insufficient thrust to power ratio, if you want to move serious cargo you need so much power that thermals become unmanageable. Other engines use the propellant as coolant, which is kind of genius - but also requires large propellant mass flow. Still, very useful for low mass probes!
Sorry, didn't mean to sidestep. I think we're just talking about different scenarios. Launching a nuclear thermal rocket from earth is an option for a non-stop express to anywhere in the inner system. There's plenty of use cases for those.
But up-thread and side-thread, people were discussing "serious space travel", "permanent Mars colonies" and "asteroids" with nuclear propulsion. In that case, I assumed we would do more things than just sending resources from Earth to X. A system-wide economy requires more fuel, and while the hydrogen can come from anywhere (luckily, since you need to refuel all the time), the Uranium can only come from Earth. And once you start pushing asteroids, you need to get up a whole lot of fuel.
OK, so maybe same scenario, but different timescales.
Point taken. We just need to hurry up and invent that Epstein Drive!
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