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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.
Nuclear would be much more feasible, no worries about long term health effects and less shielding, weight, propellant, and costs.
Quick, hide the sensitive people like children and, people who are less rational and more spastic than children like MDSolar! Somebody used the word NUKULAR and there might even be a RAYDEEASHUN!!
We should ban all things nukular from space because polluting natural, artisanal, organic, and non-GMO space with radeyashun would be a crime!
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
No way. First there are international laws and treaties preventing ANY nuclear devices I space. SECONDLY. the second the U.S.launches a nuclear device into space either Russia and or China will lAunch then as well, but at the U.S.
Or a transporter with Heisenberg compensator? Or why not just put a big rope around Mars and rope it closer to the Earth?
Why not? Bringing up fictional technologies, might as well go all out.
ESA: We made it to mars america! our rover is collecting samples and data.
ISRO: America! we need some help analyzing these samples! can you send a rover to kindly do the needful?
Russian space agency: Da. We are needing help with this outpost America. New supplies and ships needed for our colony.
NASA: look guys uh....we're in our fifth government shutdown, the supreme courts been vacant for 3 years, I think...i think most of our drinking water is lead these days and we just pledged another 800 billion to the terror war and the great wall of mexico. But if you can somehow work Mars exploration into religious freedom i think we can keep the radio comms up another month.
Good people go to bed earlier.
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).
We shouldn't pollute space with hard radiation!
I can see environmentalists objecting with something like that.
Last time I checked Mars has like .6 the atmosphere of Earth and no magnetosphere... so... They still have the radiation problem... Instead of having to push the bodies out of airlocks they'll get to bury them in Martian soil... I'm not saying this isn't a solveable problem, it just needs to be part of the design.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Mars is barren, extremely inhospitable, wasteland. Why are they in such a hurry to send meatbags there ?
>> may take people to Mars quicker
Slowing down to catch the planet, getting back off the planet, and returning back to earth would all seem to be bigger problems.
It's only part of the meatbag that counts in this game. The first penis on Mars must be a American penis, or the terrorists have won.
http://www.space.com/26713-imp...
NASA themselves has tested it and said that, impossible as it is, this type of rocket engine works
We need to launch a few nuclear tugs. They can be used to move spacecraft up to higher orbit, so we don't need to use large expendable boosters. Just get the craft into orbit, meet up with a tug, and push it to a higher orbit or even escape velocity. Then the tug can return to low orbit to be refueled and ready for the next mission. The tug still needs propellant, it just uses the nuclear power to heat it for propulsion.
A 0.01g constant acceleration ship gives you the Solar System.
A ship capable of a constant 0.01g acceleration would be a game-changer. Break the steps down as X-prizes. Build a 0.001g ship. Scale it up to a 0.005g ship. Next step is get it to 0.01g and you can reach Mars in three months and anywhere out to Pluto in just less than a year. First place to go? Prospecting the asteroid belt would be my vote. Find useful stuff, use it to build more useful stuff.
"NASA's Journey To Mars MAY Use Nuclear Rockets"
can just as easily be:
"NASA's Journey To Mars MAY NOT Use Nuclear Rockets"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propulsion%29
Mars is barren, extremely inhospitable, wasteland. Why are they in such a hurry to send meatbags there ?
Antarctica, the Mariana's Trench, the top of Mount Everest, the surface of the Moon and low earth orbit are all barren and extremely inhospitable wastelands and we've visited all of those. There are plenty of good reasons to want to put people on the surface of Mars too. We can learn a lot from inhospitable places and even more from figuring out how to get there and stay alive. Furthermore what is uninhabitable today may become a viable destination with an adequate application of technology. Nobody is asking you to go.
Speaking of which, has anyone figured out how to get someone to Mars without being killed by exposure to the natural radiation in route?
There are Top People working on it. But that is just one of several show stopper problems we'll have to figure out before a visit to Mars becomes viable. And if we want to stay there for any length of time there are even more problems to solve. Probably doable but it's going to take a while to work them out. The precise length of "a while" will be contingent upon funding and societal motivation.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
One would surely hope.
We'd have been to Mars and back by now had NERVA not been killed. Stupid Americans, stupid Soviets, stupid William Proxmire.
There is a plan that would get us to Mars soon and in the budget we have. But Congress wouldn't like it because it wouldn't use their favorite pork rocket (SLS), and possibly not even Orion (which is a less-bad idea than SLS is, but still ultra inefficient).
But the fact is that we didn't even have a "plan" to get to the Moon when JFK made his Rice University speech. Or we did, but it was wrong. The original plan was to use direct ascent of the Apollo command module off the surface of the Moon and go straight back to Earth. But such a plan would've required a launch vehicle much larger than the Saturn V. Instead, we used Lunar Orbit Rendezvous, which allowed us to use just Saturn V. And of course, we had to shut down Saturn V production during the Apollo program because even Saturn V was too expensive and unsustainable. SLS is even worse, as it uses old Shuttle parts (developed in the 1970s, for God(dard)'s sake!) which were originally intended to be reusable but now we're just throwing away (the worst of both worlds... the upfront cost of reusable parts and the expense of throwing the whole thing away each time), and so we can afford to fly just once every other year (and each Mars mission will require several launches).
We can explore Mars entirely with EELV-class launch vehicles. Atlas V has a 7.2 meter fairing available, Delta IV Heavy can put about 28 tons in orbit (enough for the largest "single piece", provided we use docking... but no orbital assembly required), Falcon Heavy will launch within a year (it starts testing in Texas soon), can put over 50 tons to orbit (more with cross-feed), and Vulcan (the successor to Atlas V and Delta IV being designed now with Blue Origin's BE-4 engine) can handle a 8.4 meter fairing (same as SLS) and in Heavy configuration could also handle at least 50 tons to LEO.
We can also use either SpaceX's Dragon or Boeing's Starliner capsules, which are much more efficient, to get crew to space and back. The actual vehicle to bring astronauts to Mars vicinity wouldn't actually bring Orion along anyway, as the current plan is to rendezvous in a distant retrograde lunar orbit.
Our human exploration funding is dominated by SLS and Orion, both elements of which are way too expensive and will be available in full form much later than EELV-class vehicles (available now, with twice the capacity available sooner than SLS's first test launch) and Dragon/Starliner (set for 2017 crewed debut). Instead of wasting our funding on two elements we don't need, we could spend the money on a small transfer vehicle (perhaps using solar-electric propulsion, but chemical rockets would work, too) and a Mars lander/ascent vehicle in addition to surface elements.
Instead of duplicating effort, we should focus on what we actually need to do Mars. Lander and transit hab.
Congress (or rather, those in Congress who make a stink about space exploration because it provides jobs in their districtrs) knows SLS/Orion aren't strictly required, knows they're very expensive (which is why they're supportive of them... more cost = more jobs in their district), what they want is to somehow cement SLS/Orion in place so their districts are guaranteed to receive funds for decades. That's really the whole issue, here. ...there's also a huge revolution going on in spaceflight. Truly affordable reusable vertical takeoff, vertical landing (VTVL) rocket technology is now scaling up to enormous size. You have SpaceX with reusable flyback boosters for Falcon 9 and Heavy, plus Blue Origin tooling up for their own VTVL orbital vehicle. ULA (who makes Atlas V and Delta IV) is developing orbital refueling technology with Vulcan, which is hugely enabling. And we're just getting started. SpaceX has plans for an enormous reusable launch vehicle also using methane/LOx technology and intends to send people in 2025 (perhaps using Falcon Heavy and a Raptor-based lander, perhaps using the enormous vehicle). This is far earlier than any NASA plan could possibly hope for given its budget and Co
Journey To Mars Might Not Use Nuclear Rockets
I'm betting on the later
Anyone could write this article after playing Kerbal Space Program. Everyone knows you take the nuclear engines to go to Duna [Mars analog].
I thought they weren't even to theoretically able to keep the crew alive for the journey.
While the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 does specifically ban nuclear WEAPONS in Article IV, as mentioned elsewhere, nuclear power, either as a power source or propulsion source is not banned.
This could become interesting if someone built an ORION-drive spacecraft. Even so, calling the bombs in question "impulse devices" would technically make them allowable under the Outer Space Treaty. . .
Fantasy rockets for a fantasy mission. Wouldn't want to use the real ones because they will probably explode and make a mess.
Yeah, it'd be great if we could just wish new physics into being.
Might as well wish for wormholes or teleportation.
In reality, we need rockets. And chemical rockets actually work just fine. Nuclear-thermal would cost about as much as SLS, and wouldn't even be that useful, it'd just be a nice in-space stage. Reusable launch tech (which we're getting thanks to SpaceX, Blue Origin, Masten Space Systems, and others) gets you cheap launch which makes a nuclear-thermal stage an unnecessary frivolity. Nuclear-thermal rockets tend to be much lower thrust than chemical rockets, too, so you don't get as full advantage of the Oberth effect without multiple passes through the Van Allen belts. Not as low thrust as electric propulsion (which has MUCH higher Isp than nuclear-thermal, so still pays for itself), but still bad compared to chemical rockets. You gain a little lower launch mass, but still not as good as electric propulsion can do.
Cheap launch with in-orbit refueling, high mass fraction chemical stages (like ULA's Centaur or ACES), aerocapture, and ISRU are ultimately much, much better than nuclear-thermal with it's deeply cryogenic (i.e. very high boil-off) liquid hydrogen and low-thrust-to-weight ratio and enormous, heavy tanks for that liquid hydrogen. Also, methane/oxygen is a LOT easier to produce on Mars (or even the Moon) than the same amount of liquid hydrogen. For the same amount of water, you can produce fully TWENTY times as much stoichiometric methane/oxygen for a chemical rocket as you can liquid hydrogen for a nuclear thermal rocket.
Electric propulsion (using either solar or nuclear for electricity production--solar is higher performing in the inner solar system and nuclear-electric is higher performing in the outer solar system) is close to constant-acceleration. Solar-electric especially would be a good choice for Mars transport (at very least for cargo), and improving solar technology (mainly producing lighter weight solar panels) can allow continual improvement in the amount of acceleration you can achieve. But chemical propulsion would work just about as well, though would require more mass (but if mass is cheap, who cares?).
Or they might use an improbability machine. Maybe, or an inertialess drive, or maybe -
sigh. another maybe article.
I am typically first in line to balk at mysterious propulsion systems that are claimed to work while violating our current understanding of physics. We have them by the truckload and they are bullshit.
But wait...
Back in 2001 a small satellite propulsion research company was investigating different techniques involving electric engines. That in itself is nothing spectacular. For whatever reason, they developed and tested a closed cavity microwave drive. I do not now the story of why they did such a thing, since it would not be viable under the law of conservation of momentum. But their data showed otherwise. When the announcement hit the conspiracy theory world, I remember debating the matter with my conspiracy theory friends, citing said law as proof the data is wrong or outright faked.
Over the years scientists here and there have got wind of the original research, built the device, achieved similar results, wrote a paper and moved on. More recently NASA, or at least a propulsion research group at NASA has been messing with it. Despite not knowing how the thing works fundamentally, they have been able to make modifications that have brought it to a level of viability and foresee being able to increase it's thrust even greater. Pretty much the final argument against data showing it works was the proposal that thermal currents accounted for the extra energy. So it was tested in a hard vacuum. Still works.
If you have never heard it, NASA has a very in depth article on it here: Evaluating NASA’s Futuristic EM Drive
I highly suggest reading the whole thing. As it currently appears, it could be used, right now, to dramatically reduce the cost and time involved in getting humans to Mars. My brain is fighting itself on this. First, it appears it should not work. Second, should we use a highly effective space propulsion system without knowing how it works?
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
NERVA or the current Nuclear Cryogenic methods ( see http://www.nasa.gov/topics/technology/features/ntrees.html) Would have saved Matt Damon's character lots of time....
With them a conjunctive trip would take on the order of a few months, and the nuclear components are VERY durable (just a graphite-ceramet-uranimum or similar cylinder). You could use a falcon heavy or Delta heavy to bring up the parts then use classic Apollo or ISS tested linakge methods to join the craft together. You could even send the fuel (liquid hydrogen and oxygen, or just water) ahead of time. The NASA folks did LOTS of recent work on this concept, see the proceedings from AIAA SPACE 2014 and 2015....
Those were really interesting points. I was actually thinking of a fission fragment rocket or stuff like nuclear electric.
They have a more or less working technology to bring astronauts in 6-7 month to Mars and not a budget to fund it, and now they propose using a technology which has not been implemented and used? Interesting, I thought the wanted to go 2030+ and have not enough funding. How is developing a new technology cheaper? Yes I saw there is an article on the principle here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and yes it is not the crazy nuke drive which would not work reliable.
I know that. Still from a working propulsion technology to Mars is much easier than creating a new device and using that.
I have my issues with congress, but the Obama admin has been flagging a "mission to mars" on the NASA websites for years while pushing the congress to eliminate American manned spaceflight and destroy any possibility of a manned mars mission. Stop looking at that damned Obama administration run website and START READING the text of the BUDGETS they keep demanding congress support!!!. You Obama huggers are always claiming to be super-educated - try PROVING it by at least showing that you can READ a substantive document like a budget rather than a shiny website written at a third grade level.
In 2009, Obama pushed for a FY2010 NASA budget to eliminate all American manned spaceflight. The man campaigned on the promise to do that in 2008 (he promised the teachers' unions he'd shift the money to K-12 education). Of course, if you are a moron who adores those fascist-style Obama "Hope and Change" posters, then you probably payed no attention to any details or facts.
THIS YEAR Obama proposed hacking away over 30% of the funds for all deep space activities (probes, spacecraft, and launch vehicles) to shift the cash to study global warming. The Obama administration has never supported ANY nuclear engine project for ANY deep space missions, in part because they have proposed down-sizing or eliminating all space exploration missions beyond Earth orbit in EVERY SINGLE BUDGET proposal, and Obama himself has even publicly ridiculed any return to the moon.
The ONLY reason any US space activity beyond low Earth orbit is still in the schedules/plans is that a VERY RARE bi-partisan group in congress keeps blocking president Obama's efforts to stop it. You can get frustrated with the space activity congress IS supporting, as I do, not the congressional policies are the camel you get from a bi-partisan committee charged with designing a horse - it ain't pretty, but it'll get the job done and it beats the alternative of NOTHING.
Your grasp of some of this is paper-thin. Several issues:
There actually WAS a plan to get to the moon long before Kennedy called for it (which is why when he asked Von Braun and others for a goal we could achieve, the moon plan was available). Grumman got the contract for the LEM in part because they'd already done a lot of the planning for the mission under earlier research contracts and had a big headstart over other vendors. The Saturn rocket program had been started under the Eisenhower administration under the management of the US Army Ballistic missiles division at the Redstone arsenal, which is why Saturn I rockets (developed under the name Juno V) were flying from the cape within months of Kennedy being sworn-in as president. The contracts for the F-1 engines were issued before Kennedy became president. Had they not been, those engines would not have been ready in 1968. What Kennedy DID was [1] select the plan, [2] convince the congress to fund it, and [3] give it a deadline and a sense of urgency (all vital, but not possible without the ground having been prepared by the previous administration and all those aerospace firms having already started)
EELV-based mars plans are a fantasy. They are a favorite of the guys who build them and a favorite of the activists desperate to see man on Mars as soon as possible, and it always looks good "on paper", but there are some problems: [1] Nobody has ever proven that they can launch enough of them in quick-enough succession to put a Mars mission together in orbit and send it on its way (remember: cryogenic fuels that are needed for a non-nuclear Mars-injection burn boil-off in orbit in HOURS and you cannot build a rocket big enough to contain them in gaseous form). [2] The fuel depots often advertized as a solution have never been proven AND require a whole gaggle of additional timely EELV launches. [3] The Delta IV is currently too expensive to launch for most missions and the Atlas uses Russian engines which are being rationed. [4] EELVs have strict limits on the both the mass and the VOLUME that can be launched on one vehicle. Some things simply cannot be divided-up into ten parts and launched on ten EELVs.
Dragon and Starliner are NOT deep space capsules. They were designed for LEO taxi service, lacking things like sufficient radiation shielding for the Van Allen belts (LEO is INSIDE the belts), the ability to be manned in space for long periods (they are designed to be manned for HOURS to/from the ISS and then hibernate for months at the ISS as standby lifeboats). Dragon-haters aside, the Dragon has a heatshield that could probably withstand reentry from a Mars mission, but Starliner certainly does not. The truth about ALL three capsules (including Lockmart's Orion) is that they are non-optimal for Mars missions having all been derived from earlier non-Mars plans and ALL would need to mate with a much larger spacecraft for the Earth-Mars and Mars-Earth parts of any such mission. No matter the larger vehicle however, the capsules NEED the radiation protection and the heat shields for reentry from the speeds of a Mars return which are higher than even from a lunar return.
The Falcon from SpaceX is shaping-up to be a great new launch vehicle, but Elon Musk is no religious figure - the worship is irrational. I have every confidence he will outperform ULA and eventually be re-flying rockets BUT his rocket depends on deep cryo LOX with temps so low and critical that the most recent launch had to be scrubbed several times over temperature control issues. Such scrubs are fine when you are launching individual payloads and undoubtably a fine trade-off for the added performance, BUT would kill a Mars mission that required a dozen falcon-sized rockets to put their payloads into LEO and dock them to each other within, for example, 24 hours. Musk is a smart guy who knows this which is why he is working on a massive mars rocket.
It's pretty funny watching Musk worshippers scream about the awful giant rocket congress has ordered NASA to build as an alternative to president Obama's repeated attempts to de-fund manned BEO activities, and whine that it all can be done with EELV-class or Falcon9 rockets ----- while their hero Mr Musk is working on a massive Mars rocket.
1. The voyager probes were powered by nuclear-fuelled RTGs
2. Every LEM the US landed on the moon was carrying an RTG (Radio-Thermal Generator, "radio" as-in radiological, rather than AM or FM)
3. The declaration of the previous poster would be a surprise to the Russians, who powered many of their cold war spy satellites with unshielded reactors, one of which fell into Canada distributing plutonium on the ground, and many of which are dead in high "disposal" orbits - meaning they will rain-down on the Earth in a few centuries if nobody does anything about them.
4. Russia and China have a long history of ignoring any treaty that proves inconvenient. The US has internal political forces that cause it to adhere to inconvenient treaties, but would almost certainly also violate them for anything truly vital. Treaties are a great way for diplomats to pat each other on the back and feel good and they're a great excuse to a state dinner with lots of glamor and fine foods and beverages and PR photos, but they never truly get in the way of anybody's vital national interests - just ask Neville Chamberlain.
In the aftermath of the loss of the Columbia, the Bush administration directed NASA to return to deep space exploration, arguing that if we are to risk the lives of astronauts in space it ought to be for big things like exploring new worlds. Part of this was the Constellation program to return to the moon to build a permanent manned base at the lunar south pole before putting a man on Mars, which congress under-funded and president Obama cancelled. But the other part was a boost to the Bush administration's re-start of the 1960s nuclear power and rocket engines programs which like everything else he did alarmed the political left.,/p>
The Bush restart of the nuclear rocket engines program was called "Project Prometheus" and was allowed to die-off as Constellation slipped its schedule, was underfunded, and the politics of the day eliminated further Democratic cooperation with Bush.
An impulse system using pellets of uranium or plutonium would be far more realizable than a fusion system. Electron or ion beam systems the size of a dishwasher can achieve pellet compression sufficient to reach critical density for fission. We could have a vehicle that could take off from the Earth's surface, go to the moon, and return with a soft landing. Only problem: lots of radiation emitted into the atmosphere, so such a system would have to be beyond Earth orbit. But it would be ideal for Earth/Moon and Earth/Mars.
About 20 years from now nanotechnology, 3D fabrication systems, AI and fusion power will be very far ahead of what we have now so the plan seems viable except for one little detail, why would we need to send humans at all?
Corona spy satellites, they did put alot of them up.
http://www.businessinsider.com/boeing-just-patented-a-jet-engine-powered-by-lasers-and-nuclear-explosions-2015-7
Boeing is working on a nuclear engine already. The old is new again indeed. Forgot my log-in, besides who cares. It will be buried by all the BS anyway.
Every time I see a "some jackass proposes Mars mission" post on /., I pop in, read the article, and close it in disgust when I see the clown didn't mention NERVA or thermal nuclear rockets. A nine month journey to Mars is simply not possible with our current level of technology - the life support mass alone would be nigh impossible to orbit, from both a technical and financial standpoint. A nuclear thermal rocket (such as the NERVA) offers a specific impulse of 850 or more, at least four times better than most conventional chemical rocket engines can manage. Moreover, it also provides enough raw thrust to perform important time-sensitive maneuvers (such as orbital insertion and circularizing) once it gets there, unlike an ion engine, and scales up to a human-sized craft quite well. A NERVA engine gives you a transit measured in weeks, not months. It's basically a prerequisite for any serious Mars mission - especially in the timeframes being discussed, because it's the only one that's had actual R&D work done on it before and reached the prototype stage.
It is extremely satisfying to be vindicated by NASA itself - clearly, they can add as well as I can, and came to the same conclusion, as evidenced by this exciting news that they are actually continuing development of thermal nuclear propulsion.
We will need one of those Antimatter / Positronic / Dilithium Generators. That will be the only thing that will get us up to warp speed and finally allow us to traverse the Multiverse.
Paul E. Bahre
Here is my plan to mars: https://logiclogiclogic.wordpress.com/category/space-policy