Space missions in the future could travel to Mars, asteroids and the outer solar system by riding on nuclear-powered rockets, thanks to a new design that utilizes energy from the nuclear fission of liquid uranium to heat propellant.
The exciting potential of the new technology, which is called a centrifugal nuclear thermal rocket (CNTR), can be neatly summed up by its specific impulse, which describes how efficient a rocket is at generating thrust. In principle, a CNTR rocket can double the specific impulse provided by previous nuclear thermal rocket designs dating back to the 1950s (and still being worked on by NASA and DARPA today) as well as quadruple that which can be achieved by chemical rockets.
Although no nuclear-powered rocket has ever flown, space agencies around the world are increasingly looking at nuclear propulsion as a means of speeding up interplanetary voyages.
"The longer you are in space, the more susceptible you are to all types of health risks," Dean Wang of Ohio State University, who is one of the authors of a new NASA-funded study into CNTR, said in a statement. "So if we can make that any shorter, it’d be very beneficial."
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