An engine that the United States tried to build without success in the Cold War

The new space race has brought back the attempts to develop rocket engines much faster. And it is not NASA, but the European Space Agency who is chasing the old dream.

Context. The thermal Nuclear Propulsion Motor (NTP) is an almost as old idea as the space race itself. In the same 1961 speech with which John F. Kennedy promised to take a man to the moon, he also requested funds for the Nuclear Rover rocket with the promise of “an even more exciting and ambitious exploration of space.” More than 60 years later, space nuclear dream is still a unfulfilled promise.

Europe wants to try. Interplanetary trips twice as fast. That is the central promise of nuclear propulsion, and ESA believes that it is an attainable future to reduce the nine months of earth-marte travel to half.

With the help of the heavyweights of the French space and nuclear industry (CEA, Arianegroup and Framatome), ESA has concluded in his study alumni that technology offers “huge increases in performance” and “can be operated safely.”

Meanwhile, in the United States. NASA has had to end its last attempt to develop an NTP engine. He Draco projectdirect heir to the initiatives of the 60s (the Rover and Nerva projects), has fallen into the Trump administration cuts. The justification of the White House for cutting is that they are “expensive investments” and “there are other alternatives.”

The news has fallen as a jug of cold water for those involved. Bhavya Lal, former associated administrator of the NASA, He said to Spacenews: “We have spent almost 20,000 million dollars in space nuclear energy since the 50s and the only system we currently have is a radioisotope generator the size of a 100 watt bulb.”

Many possibilities. One thing is the generators of the Martian Rovers or the Voyager and New Horizons probes, which use the heat of passive disintegration of the plutonium to generate some electricity with their small radioisotope generators (RTG), and a very different one is an active fission reactor to generate a massive thrust (a NTP rocket engine).

New Horizons illustrates the difference well. It was one Mission to explore Plutobut it passed through the dwarf planet without the capacity to enter its orbit, obtaining just 24 hours of data. With nuclear propulsion, I could have orbized for years, and the scientific return would have been immensely superior.

Oh, irony. Jared Isaacman, Trump’s nominated to direct NASA that was removed when Elon Musk lost its influence on the White Househe was a supporter of the development of this type of engines. The NTP are “exactly the type of thing in which NASA should concentrate its resources,” he said on one occasion.

Now, Without Isaacman And with the Canceled Draco project, Europe embarks cautiously on the path of nuclear propulsion while the United States step back. Kennedy’s promise is still waiting. Of course, the things of space go slowly, and there are still a few viability studies before the European thermal nuclear propulsion engine takes shape.

Image | POT

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