This project is a NASA / JPL attempt to develop a more heavily instrumented craft travelling farther from the Sun. The concept would need to power its ion thrusters with a nuclear fission reactor and a system for converting the reactor’s heat to electricity. This could give the craft more than 100 times more...
While the US and the Soviet Union were beginning work on NTR systems, a group of American researchers also considered a more direct and dramatic way to use nuclear power to propel a spaceship: detonate small atomic bombs behind it. The ORION project, as it was named, seems to have originated with Dr. Theodore...
Researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory have also considered another interesting NTR propulsion scheme, known as a “gas core nuclear rocket (GCNR)”. In a GCNR, hydrogen is pumped into one end of a cylindrical reaction chamber, with an exhaust at the other end. The hydrogen expands as it passes through the chamber, and...
The idea of using atomic power as the basis for a rocket engine pre-dates the First World War, but at that time neither liquid rocket engines nor atomic power were realities, and these concepts were essentially speculations about speculations. However, by the end of World War II, both large liquid-fuel rocket engines and atomic...
While an inertial confinement fusion (ICF) would use lasers or particle beams to achieve fusion, a magnetic confinement fusion (MCF) might achieve fusion by confining plasma with strong magnetic fields. This should be possible, since the fusion plasma is composed primarily of ions and electrons that are susceptible to magnetic forces. The fusion plasma...
This would use high-power lasers or particle beams to compress a pellet of fusion fuel (typically deuterium-tritium, D-T), heating it to fusion conditions. Functionally, this would work by placing the fuel pellet at the focal point of several lasers or particle beams. Together, they would compress and heat the pellet at the same time....
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the U.S. developed a nuclear rocket. The fissionable material in the graphite fuel element was in the form of particles of uranium carbide coated with pyrolytic carbon. The engine that was developed as a result of this program was called NERVA (Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application)....
Radiation created by nuclear technologies is dangerous to both humans and their machines. Any use of nuclear propulsion technology would have to be accompanied by the use of extensive shielding and “hardening.” The potential advantages of nuclear propulsion over chemical methods are staggering. The energy that is available from nuclear reactions (fission, fusion, and...