NASA is embarking on building nuclear technology in an effort to get to Mars. The US Space Agency has set its eyes on the Red Planet, aiming to get astronauts there by the late 2030s or early 2040s.
And it views nuclear thermal propulsion as a key breakthrough that could make this goal more attainable, by slashing the travel time to and from the Red Planet. So, In less than 4 years, NASA could be testing a nuclear rocket in space. The $499 million program is named DRACO, short for the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cis-lunar Operations.
Just a day back, NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, had announced that Lockheed Martin has been selected to design, build and test a propulsion system that could one day speed astronauts on a trip to Mars.
Lockheed will partner up with the Virginia-based company BWX Technologies, which will develop the DRACO spacecraft's nuclear reactor and produce its low-enriched uranium fuel. Every 26 months or so, Mars and Earth are close enough for a shorter journey between the worlds.
But even then it is a pretty long trip, lasting seven to nine months. For most of the time, the spacecraft is just coasting through space. But if the spacecraft could continue accelerating through the first half of the journey and then start slowing down again, the travel time could be slashed.
Current rocket engines, which typically rely on the combustion of a fuel like hydrogen or methane with oxygen, are not efficient enough to accomplish that; there is not enough room in the spacecraft to carry that much propellant. But nuclear reactions, generating energy from the splitting of uranium atoms, are much more efficient.
The DRACO engine would consist of a nuclear reactor that would heat hydrogen from a chilly minus 420 degrees Fahrenheit to a toasty 4,400 degrees, with the hot gas shooting from a nozzle to generate thrust. Greater fuel efficiency could speed up journeys to Mars, reducing the amount of time astronauts spend exposed to the treacherous environment of deep space.
DRACO will not be using weapons-grade uranium for its reactors..but will rather use a lesser-enriched form of uranium. The reactor would not be turned on until it reached space, part of the precautions to minimize the possibility of a radioactive accident on Earth.
The DRACO development is to culminate with a flight test of the nuclear-thermal engine. The demonstration spacecraft would most likely orbit at an altitude between 435 and 1,240 miles. That is high enough to ensure that it stays in orbit for more than 300 years, or long enough for radioactive elements in the reactor fuel to decay to safe levels.
The target launch window at the moment is late 2025 or early 2026. Nuclear propulsion for space is not a new idea. In the 1950s and 1960s, Project Orion — financed by NASA, the Air Force and the Advanced Research Projects Agency — contemplated using the explosions of atomic bombs to accelerate spacecraft. A series of 23 reactors were built and tested, but none were ever launched to space.
The successful use of nuclear fuels for space propulsion technologies might open up new frontiers in space exploration. Only time will tell how successful such trailblazing innovations would be.
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