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ABOUT NUCLEAR SPEED🦘

Before NASA can put astronauts on Mars, the space agency will have to get them there and have a plan for getting them back. No current in-space transportation system can do this, but in the race to develop one that can, nuclear thermal propulsion appears to have some clear advantages.

The first human mission to Mars will probably be fueled either with a more advanced version of the traditional chemical propulsion we have been using for decades—perhaps coupled with a solar electric system—or else with nuclear thermal propulsion. The latter, which works by passing hydrogen gas through the engine’s nuclear reactor to create hot exhaust, was tested and demonstrated in the 1960s and 1970s but never actually flown.

 
Nuclear thermal heavily leverages existing chemical propulsion systems.
 
The technology owes a lot to traditional chemical propulsion. “While it hasn’t been done yet, nuclear thermal heavily leverages existing chemical propulsion systems that you see, for example, on launch vehicles,” says Mary Beth Koelbl, director of the Propulsion Systems Department at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.



“The difference is you’re taking a nuclear reactor and using it to produce your heat, but you still need a turbo pump to pump the fluid to the nuclear reactor, you still need a valve to open and close, you still need lines to route those chemicals.”


NASA has not selected the specific plan or technologies that will drive the human mission to Mars, which would launch in the 2030s if the current schedule holds. But it is generally understood that crew will travel separately from most of the equipment they will need on the Red Planet, so the astronauts can travel lighter and faster.


Various teams in NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) are working to get their respective technologies in finest form by the early 2020s, when the Agency may start making concrete decisions about the first mission to Mars.


“Our job, we believe, is to ensure all the technology options are viable so that NASA can make a well-understood and fact-based decision about transportation architecture,” says Ron Litchford, STMD’s principal technologist for propulsion.

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