NASA Looks At Reviving Atomic Rocket Program (newatlas.com)

Big Hairy Ian shares a report from New Atlas: When the first manned mission to Mars sets out, it may be on the tail of an atomic rocket engine. The Space Race vintage technology could have a renaissance at NASA after the space agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama signed a contract with BWXT Nuclear Energy to develop updated Nuclear Thermal Propulsion (NTP) concepts and new fuel elements to power them.

Today, with NASA once again considering the challenges of sending astronauts to Mars, the nuclear option is back on the table as part of the agency's Game Changing Development program. Under this, NASA has awarded BMXT, which supplies nuclear fuel to the U.S. Navy, a $18.8-million contract running through September 30, 2019 to look into the possibility of developing a new engine using a new type of fuel. Unlike previous designs using highly enriched uranium, BMXT will study the use of Low-Enriched Uranium (LEU), which has less than 20 percent of fissile uranium 235. This will provide a number of advantages. Not only is it safer than the highly enriched fuel, but the security arrangements are less burdensome, and the handling regulations are the same as those of a university research reactor. If NASA determines next month that the LEU engine is feasible, the project will conduct testing and refine the manufacturing process of the Cermet fuel elements over the course of a year, with testing of the full-length Cermet fuel rods to be conducted at Marshall.

Slashdot reader Big Hairy Ian adds: "At the very least it looks much more feasible than Project Orion."

Comments

Absolutely!

[thesupraman]

Look at what a horrific disaster all those exploding reactors have been on navy ships and submarines!
When will people realize the horror of nuclear reactors! Radiation! Radiation!

Not to mention the ecological disaster that there would be if evil radiation were to leak in space!
Do people not realize it is the one truly pristine environment left?

Every single ONE of the radioactive RTGs that we have sent up on rockets has caused untold deaths! The chemical rockets on the other hand make rainbows brighter and butterflies more colourful!

The horror..

Re:Simple Question

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm replying as AC because I modded-up this and I think questions like this should be answered from time to time, even though I disagree with the apparent sentiments.

Firstly, "paying down the national debt" isn't necessarily as useful as one might think. Certainly, avoiding indebtedness to foreign powers may be of strategic importance, and rapid expansion of national debt for big spending programs might stoke high inflation that drives economic instability. However, most of the national debt (along with most money in the economy) is funded with money that has been created from thin-air by private-sector banks, and perhaps laundered through the economy to look more real than it is. Paying-off the original debts that created the money causes it to disappear with the debt but it provides profit in the form of interest for the banks that created the money in the first place. Very little actually goes to cover capital and interest for the deposits of any real investors, and even those originated mostly in debt to generate new assets that have been laundered and liquidated into cash for deposit. This is the world of fractional reserve banking, where almost all money in the system is born out of debt and inflation.

Now to the main point about why do this instead of "more worthwhile things we could be doing, such as curing cancer, solving world hunger, or reducing our impacts on climate change". Of course those are important and, quite rightly a good deal more money –many billions of dollars– already goes into those things than the 19 million dollars going into this project.

But blue-sky technology and pure science reap huge benefits in the long term and that simply can't be foreseen. Copernicus, Galileo, Tycho Brahe, Kepler and Newton were concerned with the motions of planetary bodies and the moon. They paved the way for the foundations of the science of mechanics which is one of the pillars of all of modern engineering and science. Franklin, Faraday and many others tinkered with electricity and magnetism, and Maxwell synthesised a theory from their experiments which gave another of pillar foundations of everything we have now. Even the highly abstract theories of Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity, formulated a century ago, now have a big impact on our everyday lives.

Everything I've described (albeit in a very brief and shallow manner) is the basis for things like MRI, CT and PET scanners, computational drug discovery, understanding climate change, GNSS/GPS and countless other technologies that have the power to benefit everyone. There are bigger political decisions to be made that will have more impact than anything gained by switching funding from atomic rockets to feeding the starving. Consider the cost of building a 2000-mile wall. And if you want another perspective, consider that, in the US alone, about $200 billion is spent each year on advertising.

Personally I have no desire to move to Mars; it's way more hostile than America would have been for early settlers, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't invest a relatively small amount. One can't imagine the long-term benefits that humanity might eventually reap from the effort.

I haven't bothered with references but if you're curious and if you really care you can easily find plenty to read about any of this.

Re:Waste of Money

[drinkypoo]

If Humans were logical creatures we'd stop funding all military, form a planetary government, and stop all talk of Martian colonization since that's not required and diverts resources from social programs and science.

That makes sense if you look no farther than your navel, and plan for no later than next week. But on a long enough time scale, a rock is going to come along and wipe out our species, and we also develop ancillary technologies while figuring out how to explore space which pay dividends right here on Earth. Unfortunately, much of our leadership is just as short-sighted as you are.

Re:Good, save the enriched uranium for other uses

[webmistressrachel]

Go watch the Boondocks, most black people know all about the lunacy of the left and the contradiction between modern money-making black "pop culture", and Martin Luther King's noble and righteous motives and goals.

MLK envisioned a future where people would be judged by the quality of their character, rather than the colour of the skin. A "colour-blind society" where people would succeed based on hard work, honesty and justice for all. He never said anything about silencing people who were white from speaking the truth, he just wanted black people who were at the time segregated, sent to the back of the bus and many other social restrictions to be treated the same as everyone else!

MLK will be spinning in his grave right now, worrying his little heart out about where BLM and BAMN could lead black people in the future, namely civil war or an SJW cult regime, under which many (mainly white people) will suffer; all in his name and on the back of his achievements; the complete antithesis of his goals.