Houston Chronicle by Alex Stuckey Oct. 14, 2019
NASA is exploring nuclear propulsion — a project started by the agency 60 years ago
With America’s eyes trained on the impending moon mission in the 1960s, NASA officials began quietly working on a project that could transform space travel.
They were trying to build a nuclear rocket engine, capable of getting astronauts to Mars in four months — about half the time of a conventional chemical rocket.
Though the program showed early promise, it died due to inadequate funding.
Almost 60 years later, NASA is picking up where it left off, working again to develop a nuclear propulsion system that could carry humans farther than ever. President Donald Trump recently issued an executive order calling on NASA to develop and launch nuclear space systems, and Congress has provided $100 million to study the cost and feasibility of building such a rocket over the next year.
“The main rationale for pursuing this again is human Mars missions,†said Jeff Sheehy, chief engineer in the Space Technology Mission Directorate at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. “There’s been a re-emphasis on going to the moon and doing those things on the moon that are necessary to develop the systems and demonstrate the capability to go to Mars.â€
But there still is a long way to go before NASA personnel can even begin to think about building these systems.
“We’re trying to determine how many billions it’s going to cost through the first set of flight(s) … so we can go to decision makers and say this is what it will cost, these are the benefits,†Sheehy said. “It’s up to the senior-most people in the agency to determine whether it’s worth the cost of developing the system.â€
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