NASA wants to send nuclear rockets to the Moon and Mars

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From Ars Technica:

"Just north of the Tennessee River near Huntsville, Alabama, there’s a six-story rocket test stand in a small clearing of loblolly pines. It’s here, in a secluded corner of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, that the US Army and NASA performed critical tests during the development of the Redstone rocket. In 1958, this rocket became the first to detonate a nuclear weapon; three years later, it carried the first American into space.

The tangled history of nukes and space is again resurfacing, just up the road from the Redstone test stand. This time NASA engineers want to create something deceptively simple: a rocket engine powered by nuclear fission."

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/09 ... -and-mars/

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[notFritzArgelander]

Interesting. What could possibly go wrong?

[Thefatkitty]

Interesting. What could possibly go wrong?

I'm gonna be laughing all night...

I remember when Cassini was launched; there was a lot of protest about launching it with its plutonium power source, in case it blew up before entering space. I wonder what this would bring

All the best,

[Ozypic]

So we're not just happy causing disasters on our own planet ? Maybe those alien guys will step in soon ....

[AntennaGuy]

Y'all worry too much.
https://scdn.slashgear.com/wp-content/u ... rrying.jpg

[GCoyote]

The more I learn about this approach, the more I feel a smaller reactor powering an electric or ion thruster would be a superior design for exploring the solar system. It would have the added advantage of plenty of excess power for experiments and other mission systems.

[Ylem]

Sounds like Project Orion,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_O ... ropulsion)

There was a good TV series about this called Asention.