Instead of designing and engineering ideas and then hiring contractors to build them, NASA is consulting with these companies throughout the process. In recent years, NASA and the military have begun to make partnerships with companies like two represented on this panel, Interstellar Technologies and Atomos Space. That much shorter journey doesn’t require nuclear energy. The industry representatives on the January panel pointed out that the government is both shy about nuclear propulsion and busy making plans to return to the moon. Musk is careful to delineate this when he discusses nuclear for SpaceX, and commercial contractors make the same distinction. Most of the conversation about nuclear flight is about propulsion once a spacecraft is in flight, not to power a launch. Doing so safely could reduce astronaut risk during the trip to Mars, especially, where exposure to ambient cosmic radiation is a huge danger. These experts have suggested for decades that the tiny nuclear energy used by some satellites and surface vehicles could scale up to power flight. The development and construction of NASA spacecraft has always gone hand in hand with aerospace contractors like Lockheed and Rockwell. In January, experts spoke about nuclear spaceflight at the Commercial Space Transportation Conference in Washington, D.C. Last year, Musk suggested nuclear thermal propulsion could shorten his planned SpaceX Starship trips to Mars Corliss’s seven-month estimate is on par with what experts today believe is the duration of a non-nuclear journey to Mars. Today, after decades marked by periodic nuclear plant meltdowns, the public is wary. Ĭorliss was writing before humans had even landed on the moon, but his description of the pros and cons of nuclear spaceflight are pretty evergreen. “Some day a rocket will thrust a manned spacecraft from its parking orbit around the earth and inject it into an elliptical transfer orbit intended to intercept the planet Mars 7 months later,” Corliss wrote for the Atomic Energy Commission- in 1966. But before the sun stopped shining on the promise of unlimited nuclear power, a prolific, curious scientist and “anomalist” named William Corliss wrote about the potential for taking nuclear energy to space. In hindsight, we know what happened next. dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan, people believed consumer nuclear power could be totally safe and revolutionary. Car makers showed concept vehicles powered by nuclear reactors. Proponents on the panel say the fuel they use is less volatile and the reaction itself is less dangerous than the association with fission weapons might suggest.ĭuring the golden age of the nuclear dream-a time when people saw nuclear energy as a radical and empowering solution to a lot of problems-scientists and designers thought up nuclear versions of almost every kind of consumer good. In a way, it’s a kind of directed nuclear weapon reaction with a limiter installed. “Low enriched uranium” is split by neutrons that initiate a chain reaction, and hydrogen propellent flowing through is vaporized into huge volumes. The idea sounds simple, and would be effective: a tiny nuclear reactor is fully, safely encased so that the only way for energy to escape is through a funneled opening. One of the latest moves is from private industry groups seeking to put nuclear-powered spacecraft at the forefront of plans to reach Mars someday. Nuclear thermal propulsion is already part of defense plans, including for an orbital weapon.Įxperts suggest exposure to reactor radiation for a shorter trip is better than cosmic radiation for a much longer trip.Įlon Musk’s SpaceX may be dominating the public imagination in 2020, but countless companies around the world are also working on spaceflight, or even components of spaceflight. A portion of the aerospace industry believes nuclear spaceflight is the key to reaching Mars.

Nuclear time journey to mars