A New NASA Design Turbocharges Nuclear Spacecraft

The biggest threat to any crewed expedition to Mars is time. NASA’s shortest blueprint for sending people to the Red Planet and back requires spending 620 days in space and 30 days on Mars. Even setting aside the compounding challenges of building life-support systems that can operate without resupply for that long, or the fact that longer journeys leave more time for unlucky accidents, life in microgravity and solar and cosmic radiation will inexorably exact their cumulative toll on human bodies.We want to make it possible to dramatically reduce the length of time crews must spend in space—down to just 335 days in transit or less. This will both simplify many engineering challenges and keep astronauts healthier and safer. We believe the key to this time reduction is a new approach to building a holy grail of space exploration, the bimodal nuclear rocket. In the 1960s, U.S. open-air ground tests demonstrated much of the technology needed for nuclear thermal rockets as part of the NERVA and Rover projects.Nevada State Museum, Las Vegas Technicians at NASA’s Lewis Research Center test a nozzle design for a nuclear thermal rocket in 1965. GRC/NASA The prototype SNAP-10A, orbited in 1…