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NASA Wants Revolutionary Radiation Shielding Tech
coondoggie writes "Long term exposure to radiation is one of the biggest challenges in long-duration human spaceflights, and NASA is now looking for what it calls 'revolutionary' technology that would help protect astronauts from harmful exposure. 'It is believed that the best strategy for radiation protection and shielding for long duration human missions is to use electrostatic active radiation shielding while, in concert, taking the full advantage of the state-of-the-art evolutionary passive (material) shielding technologies for the much reduced and weaken radiation that may escape and hit the spacecraft.'"
The one downside of nuclear rockets is that if we had another Challenger-esque disaster, this time with, say, plutonium fuel, the repercussions would be much, much, much more immense. Just to be sure, we'd have to launch all rockets from tiny little atolls in the middle of the ocean.
Except you wouldn't use plutonium for fuel.
When NASA were planning to launch NERVA rockets the flight path would have been south from California so that any launch failure would either dump the NERVA into the ocean or the Antarctic. And since it would have been boosted by a conventional Saturn V, there wouldn't be any really nasty radioactivity until the NERVA started firing late in the launch.
That said, using nuclear fission rockets for launch from Earth still seems pretty optimistic to me.