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September 28, 2019 07:00 am

NASA Wants To Send Nuclear Rockets To the Moon and Mars

NASA engineers want to create a rocket engine powered by nuclear fusion. "A nuclear rocket engine would be twice as efficient as the chemical engines powering rockets today," reports Wired. "But despite their conceptual simplicity, small-scale fission reactors are challenging to build and risky to operate because they produce toxic waste. Space travel is dangerous enough without having to worry about a nuclear meltdown. But for future human missions to the moon and Mars, NASA believes such risks may be necessary." From the report: At the center of NASA's nuclear rocket program is Bill Emrich, the man who literally wrote the book on nuclear propulsion. "You can do chemical propulsion to Mars, but it's really hard," says Emrich. "Going further than the moon is much better with nuclear propulsion." Emrich has been researching nuclear propulsion since the early '90s, but his work has taken on a sense of urgency as the Trump administration pushes NASA to put boots on the moon ASAP in preparation for a journey to Mars. Although you don't need a nuclear engine to get to the moon, it would be an invaluable testing ground for the technology, which will almost certainly be used on any crewed mission to Mars. Let's get one thing clear: A nuclear engine won't hoist a rocket into orbit. That's too risky; if a rocket with a hot nuclear reactor blew up on the launch pad, you could end up with a Chernobyl-scale disaster. Instead, a regular chemically propelled rocket would hoist a nuclear-powered spacecraft into orbit, which would only then fire up its nuclear reactor. The massive amount of energy produced by these reactors could be used to sustain human outposts on other worlds and cut the travel time to Mars in half. [...] But before a nuclear rocket engine gets its first flight, NASA needs to overhaul its regulations for launching nuclear materials. In August, the White House issued a memo that tasked NASA with developing safety protocols for operating nuclear reactors in space. Once they're adopted by NASA, the stage will be set for the first flight of a nuclear engine as soon as 2024. This coincides with Trump's deadline to return American astronauts to the moon; maybe this time they'll be hitching a ride on a nuclear rocket.

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