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NASA's Journey To Mars May Use Nuclear Rockets (blastingnews.com)
MarkWhittington writes: NASA Administrator Charles Bolden has been making the rounds of congressional committees, defending the indefensible, that being the latest Obama space agency budget proposal. Thursday it was the turn of the House Science Committee to complain to Bolden that the budget underfunded the Journey to Mars and to vow that more money would be forthcoming. One of the other complaints Congress has been making is that NASA lacks a plan to get people to Mars, scheduled to happen sometime in the 2030s. Bolden was coy, suggesting that the time was not right to start firming up architectures and missions. However, he did drop an intriguing hint that a nuclear thermal rocket engine being developed at NASA's Marshall Spaceflight Center may take people to Mars quicker than chemical rockets.
NASA had a nuclear thermal rocket program called NERVA back in the 60s (itself in part inherited from the US Air Force): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA
The program successfully developed a nuclear thermal rocket engine (successful test-firings and everything), and there were plans to build a Saturn V with a nuclear upper stage, but the program was killed by Congress because of the old "give a mouse a cookie" problem. NTRs are basically only useful for sending enormous things to Mars (or other planets), like human colony modules, since the engine and tankage is so heavy that the efficiency only becomes a benefit when the payload is even bigger. The fear was that if Congress let NASA continue NERVA development, it would lead to greater pressure for human Mars missions, which would be expensive (though I'm sure a campaign of human exploration of Mars pales in comparison to the cost of the campaigns in Vietnam and elsewhere -- and it will certainly pay off more technology dividends and look better in the history books).
Who you calling fictional, Anonymous Cavedweller?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA.
Sheesh...
No way. First there are international laws and treaties preventing ANY nuclear devices I space.
Way. In fact, it was already done long ago. The Voyager space probes have a nuclear power source.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
I believe the treat is nuclear WEAPONS... This is not a weapon, and besides which there have been numerous nuclear devices launched in recent years, New Horizons was powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, which has PLUTONIUM!!
First there are international laws and treaties preventing ANY nuclear devices I space.
No, there aren't. The Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963 bans nuclear detonations in space, which killed the Orion project (not that it would likely have gone anywhere anyway).
We launch nuclear devices into space all the time; that's how deep-space probes get their electric power. The recent proposal is to use nuclear heat generation to power a rocket, and the treaty is just peachy with that.