Keith Cooper is a freelance science journalist and editor in the United Kingdom, and has a degree in physics and astrophysics from the University of Manchester.
The US really wants a nuclear reactor on the moon by 2030. 'Achieving this future requires harnessing nuclear power,' NASA chief says100 years after Robert Goddard's 1st liquid-fueled rocket launch, NASA is using the technology to send astronauts back to the moonLower-cost space missions like NASA's ESCAPADE are starting to deliver exciting science – but at a price in risk and trade‑offsArtemis The Artemis 1 moon mission had a heat shield issue.
Here’s why NASA doesn’t think it will happen again on Artemis 2Contact me with news and offers from other Future brandsSign up to our monthly entertainment newsletter to keep up with all our coverage of the latest sci-fi and space movies, tv shows, games and books.Discover this week's must-see night sky events, moon phases, and stunning astrophotos. Sign up for our skywatching newsletter and explore the universe with us!Space.com's Sci-Fi Reader's Club. Read a sci-fi short story every month and join a virtual community of fellow science fiction fans!This week, NASA administrator Jared Isaacman announced the agency will be developing the"first nuclear powered interplanetary spacecraft" ahead of a planned 2028 launch to Mars.. If it is successful, it will be the culmination of over 60 years of experiments and failed projects in nuclear propulsion, and it could potentially transform interplanetary space travel. The spacecraft will feature a nuclear electric propulsion system that NASA says"provides an extraordinary capability for efficient mass transport in deep space." But what is this form of spacecraft engine, and how does it differ from earlier missions that utilized nuclear power in a different way?The US really wants a nuclear reactor on the moon by 2030. 'Achieving this future requires harnessing nuclear power,' NASA chief says, developed in the 1950s and which would have seen a spacecraft being propelled by the shockwaves of a rapid series of nuclear explosions behind it. Another nuclear-powered design was Project Daedalus, a British Interplanetary Society design study from the 1970s that proposed using nuclear fusion-powered engines.reactor, like a scaled-down version of the type of nuclear stations that power cities on Earth, to generate electricity that can run an ion engine.of plutonium-238, which has a half life of nearly 88 years , allowing it to power spacecraft for decades if necessary.Breaking space news, the latest updates on rocket launches, skywatching events and more!Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors NASA has been using nuclear power in space for almost as long as the Space Age itself. In the 1960s, the agency funded the Systems for Nuclear Auxiliary Power, or SNAP, project. As its name suggested, SNAP involved utilizing nuclear-derived energy on space missions.The RTG on board SNAP-3 carried 96 grams of plutonium-238, which produced a measly 2.5 watts of electrical power. Things have come a long way since the early 1960s, however. Since then RTGs have flown on interplanetary missions including the Pioneer 10 and 11 andLive long and loiter: Why NASA's ESCAPADE probes will wait a year in space before heading to MarsLower-cost space missions like NASA's ESCAPADE are starting to deliver exciting science – but at a price in risk and trade‑offs The Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator for NASA's Perseverance Mars rover is shown during a fit check with the rover at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida in April 2020.. This works by ionizing atoms belonging to a gaseous propellant, such as xenon or krypton, and then accelerating those ions out through a nozzle to provide thrust. This acceleration can be achieved in two ways. One is the application of electromagnetic fields to produce something called the Hall effect that accelerates the ions. The other way is a gridded ion thruster, in which the positively charged ions are injected into a 'discharge chamber' where they move towards a negatively charged grid and are accelerated through the holes in that grid by a voltage, expelling them once again out through a nozzle, the ion engine producing a soft blue glow.the ions can be ionized by electricity produced via solar arrays, hence we refer to such technology as solar electric propulsion . Yet you might be surprised to find that SEP typically produces less than one pound of thrust.. SEP's tiny amount of thrust is however additive, and builds up over time to push spacecraft to velocities of around 200,000 miles per hour, or more, long after an equivalent chemical rocket would have exhausted its fuel. SEP has been used on missions in Earth orbit since the 1960s. The first interplanetary mission with SEP was NASA'sin 1998, and since then it has been used to great effect by missions such as the European Space Agency's SMART-1 mission to the Moon, NASA's Replacing solar with nuclear has two advantages in deep space. One, it makes it easier for space missions to deploy ion engines in the distant outer solar system, far from the. And two, it produces between one and two orders of magnitude more power than SEP does, thereby increasing the thrust and the mass of the payload that it can carry.RTGs are not enough for this kind of work, which is why nuclear electric propulsion requires a fission reactor. The heat produced by the reactor is transformed into electricity and this is what ionizes the propellant gases for use in the ion engine. SR-1 Freedom's 20-kilowatt fission reactor, containing low-enriched uranium and uranium dioxide, would be situated at the end of a long boom, ensuring distance between the radiation that it produces and the rest of the spacecraft. In SEP, a large fraction of a spacecraft's total area is devoted to solar arrays. With NEP those solar arrays are switched out for heat exchange fins to radiate away some of the excess heat from the reactor and prevent the spacecraft's components from melting. It's worth noting that there is a third variation of the nuclear engine, which is nuclear thermal propulsion, in which the energy produced by a fission reactor heats a propellant, causing it to expand and burst through a nozzle, producing thrust like a more conventional rocket.Safety is, of course, of paramount importance when sending nuclear material into space, and people are very often scared of the word 'nuclear'.The mission's environmental impact study suggested that there was a 1 in 1,400 chance of an accident during blast-off, and 1 in 476 chance during the flight through Earth's atmosphere, which could spread radioactive material not just across Florida, from where Cassini–Huygens launched, but across the entire globe depending upon the altitude at which an accident happened. This led to serious concerns from some quarters, with science popularizer Michio Kaku among the leaders of the protests demanding the launch be scrubbed, but Cassini–Huygens' went ahead without a hitch, as have all the subsequent RTG missions. Workers install three Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators on the Cassini spacecraft at Launch Complex 40 on Cape Canaveral Space Force Station prior to its launch in 1997.Care is of course taken in ensuring that should an accident occur, the radioactive material is protected as well as can be. The risk is minimized by packaging that radioactive material inside extremely durable graphite blocks bolstered by a layer of iridium and surrounded by an aeroshell to protect the RTG should it undergo an atmospheric re-entry. Though this does not provide an absolute guarantee, one would imagine that any fission reactor launched into space would require similar safety protocols. Indeed, there are very stringent regulatory constraints, both in the United States and internationally, regarding, producing radioactive waste as well as energy. By using fission reactors in space, we are essentially sending little packets of toxic waste across the solar system, which could in the future prove dangerous for any astronauts that encounter them, or any biospheres that may exist on other planets or moons, such as Mars orThis isn't the first time that NASA has toyed with using nuclear electric propulsion. In 1965 the agency launched the SNAP-10A mission, which was the first and so far only time that nuclear electric propulsion has been successfully deployed. It was also the first time that a nuclear reactor was launched into space. That reactor operated just fine for 43 three days before developing a fault and shutting down, However, in the 61 years since SNAP-10A, there have been no further missions successfully demonstrating nuclear electric propulsion, but there have been many attempts to do so. NASA's most recent project waswhen it was left off the proposed 2026 federal budget. DARPA claimed that the costs of the program no longer matched the benefits, given that ordinary launch costs were coming down. Artist concept of Demonstration for Rocket to Agile Cislunar Operations spacecraft, which will demonstrate a nuclear thermal rocket engine. Nuclear thermal propulsion technology could be used for future NASA crewed missions to Mars.Now, however, NASA seems to have changed their tune with their renewed interest in nuclear electric propulsion. There is certainly a strong case that using nuclear power is vital if we are to launch more regular interplanetary missions and send astronauts and massive payloads to Mars or elsewhere. Yet time is certainly against NASA launching the mission in 2028 as planned, and it remains to be seen whether, after more than sixty years of trying, NASA can finally get the technology to work. If they do, then the increased efficiency and power that it can bring to electric propulsion engines could transform space travel, whether it be taking astronauts to Mars or driving scientific missions to the outer solar system. Keith Cooper is a freelance science journalist and editor in the United Kingdom, and has a degree in physics and astrophysics from the University of Manchester. He's the author of"The Contact Paradox: Challenging Our Assumptions in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence" and has written articles on astronomy, space, physics and astrobiology for a multitude of magazines and websites.The US really wants a nuclear reactor on the moon by 2030. 'Achieving this future requires harnessing nuclear power,' NASA chief saysLaunches & SpacecraftWatch the BBC's Dr Who spin-off 'The War Between the Land and the Sea' and every episode of the classic Dr Who series on your travels with our exclusive NordVPN deal'For All Mankind' is confirmed for season 6, but it'll be the final mission for Apple TV's incredible space show
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