Leadership of a new national lab by a university-affiliated partner will produce significant government cost savings. While some brilliant small R&D projects have taken place in federal agencies like DARPA (their DRACO mission) and NASA (their Fission Surface Power project), government agencies lack the cutting-edge facilities and intellectual capacity to make this essential tech development R&D come to fruition by the mid-2030s. To enable these new nuclear propulsion systems, we should rely on the real brain power of our nation – our academic institutions and American industry. This new technology development will be no easy task - both NEP and NTP systems need significant technology research and development now to create working systems ahead of other space-faring nations.Īs America did with the Apollo Program, we’ll have to start from scratch, inventing new materials, engines and nuclear systems that just don’t exist today. Having both systems operational would provide decades of capability and throw the doors of human deep space exploration wide open. Credit: NASAĪ NASA colleague once brilliantly explained that NEP and NTP are the difference “between a Prius and a Porsche.” Both cars will get you to a destination, but each at different speeds and with different trade-offs. Nuclear propulsion systems will provide significant advantages over conventional chemical propulsion systems, providing robust power while enabling more flexibility in human Mars mission architectures. Graphic showing a notional transit habitat mission to Mars using a nuclear electric propulsion (NEP) propulsion system. An NTP system would provide fast, effective propulsion for our human missions to Mars. starts serious development of an NTP system today, we might have an operational system by 2039, our back-of-the-napkin date for a first American human mission to Mars. should further study both NEP and NTP systems for human Mars missions but stopped short of prioritizing the two. #Nuclear time windows#The increased propulsive power of nuclear systems will allow humans to head to Mars on a more regular cadence than the current mission launch windows of “every 26 months.” Nuclear propulsion also will allow power for astronauts on Mars missions to abort and return to Earth in the event of an emergency.Ī recent National Academies of Sciences study concluded that the U.S. Nuclear technology, including nuclear electric propulsion (or “NEP”) and nuclear thermal propulsion (or “NTP”), will be a space travel game-changer with profound implications for deep space mission speed, agility and capability.
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