NASA Looks to Fission Power for the Future of Space Exploration

Can you imagine if there hadn't been a cold war and both sides cooperated in space exploration since the fifties. All those trillions we spent on bombs and weapons, that thankfully were never used. Humanity would have colonized the entire solar system by now.

"I've giv'n her all she's got captain, an' I canna give her no more." -- Scotty, (Several Times)

Whether we like it or not. Whether it's ten years from now or fifty years from now. Space will be our future, our salvation, and our destiny. That's is if we don't kill each other off before that time.

Forget this nuclear crap, where's the warp drive already?!

A two month trip to Mars, I'd like to see it... whoa, that's fast

I'm always down for NASA and it's exploration missions! There's more out there than we know even now, one day we'll be able to explore beyond our solar system, not just with probes, but with real people at the helm, that's the goal.

Well this is exciting, i remember reading about Nasa's early plans for Nuclear-propulsion craft under Warner Von Braun's leadership in the 50s and 60s, they were a thousand times superior to the liquid rocket-fuel ships that they ended up going with, there were more pressing issues though that led to Nasa not going with it, which was the Radiation issue and possible Meltdown issues also with any potential Nuclear reactor in those ships, it would've meant certain death for the crew. But i think we've come to a point in technology where they can come up with safety measures on any nuclear-powered space ship to reasonably protect the crew. If Nuke-power can cut space travel time in half...then that trip to the recently discovered habitable Super-Earth should be a mere 250 Years or less compared to the longer 500-1000 year trip,

This is only news to people who don't follow space programs. NASA's been using fission for decades to power exploration in applications where solar and fuel cells don't provide enough power.

"They've" been talking about nuclear based propulsion since well, before NASA existed.

Each of the systems in the article are old news.

The article's author and Yahoo Editors need to do some background work before publishing.

It could be a great advance in space exploration, but it would have been nice if they also talked a little about the plans from the sixties to use controlled nuclear detonations to launch a large platform into space. It sounds crazy now, but that was seriously considered at one time.

"NERVA was canceled by President Richard Nixon in 1973."
Nixon was a crook and knew a scam when he saw it.

go NASA!!!!!!!

This is where U.S. money should be invested.

Yeah, well this is nice and all but you're leaving out 1 crucial question:

How are you going to cool these nuclear reactors in space? You can't exchange heat directly to a vacuum in a closed primary/secondary loop setup. You can't jettison your coolant or else it will not be a closed system. And if you settle for an open coolant system, then your available power will be high only as long as you have coolant - which you will rapidly lose.

So, the only option is to lose the heat via (light or particle) radiation. That's much more difficult. Emissivity of metals is pretty high and I'm sure something can be worked out to get rid of that much heat via radiation, but it will take a ton of surface area and recirculation pumps to get the job done due to frictional losses. This in turn robs power from the reactor's thermal output.

Using current technology like this which has been deployed on the ISS as we speak, you can exchange 11.8 KW (sustained) of heat into space in the form of radiation. Unfortunately, the mass of this heat exchanger is in the metric tons. To exchange 50 MW of heat... it would require 4,237 of these devices. At 5 metric tons each, you're looking at 21,186 metric tons of equipment JUST to cool 1 50 MW reactor.

Now when you examine the propulsion systems advertised in this article with these facts in mind, you will begin to understand why these nuclear propulsion systems were cancelled in the 1970's. It's too expensive, and it's too massive for it to be of any real use. Your thrust to mass ratio isn't nearly high enough to provide useful acceleration.

These space heat exchangers will need to improve by 3 or 4 orders of magnitude in effective specific thermal power dissipation before they're taken seriously as a cooling option for these reactors. I'm not currently working on such a project, but anyone familiar with materials science and thermodynamics can tell that these things will have to operate at much higher temperatures before they can exchange this type of heat into radiation. These high temperatures cause all kinds of other problems... it gets really ugly when you start looking into it.

I think that nuclear fission is an EXCELLENT idea for space, and very much can be accomplished with it. But for now we need to work out efficient ways of cooling our equipment before we start lobbing more reactors up there.

this is great news. the chemical fueled rocket has limits, and we have nearly reached them. a nuc powered mars or asteroid mission would be the cats' pajamas.

any project geared towards sending people to mars should be shut down.

THERE is no reason to send flesh and blood to mars. We have been sucessfully sending probes since 1976.

There is nothing a person can do on mars that a machine cannot do 10 times better, at one HUNDRETH of the cost.

And when the machine is done, you just leave it there.

Sorry trekkies, no colony on mars, unless you are a robot!

Once we can effectively colonize Mars, we should begin relocating all the liberals there..

A step closer to warp drive!

Phase-shift plasma turbine more relativistic space drive powered by aneutronic fusion reactor that will be a safer and steadier step towards interstellar travels.

How many doctors could be educated for the price of this?

NASA--looks for its next line of BUL--S%%%
To scoaf up all your tax dollars..
$$$$---take me on a joy ride.