NASA nuclear missiles to transport humans to Mars

North of the Tennessee River, Alabama, there is a test platform for six-storey space rocket launchers.

In this part of the Marshall Space Mission Center, the US military and NASA conducted important tests during the development of the Redstone spacecraft.

In 1958, Redstone became the first vehicle to detonate a nuclear weapon, and three years later it carried the first American astronaut into space.

Are you leading us to Mars?
Nowadays, NASA engineers want to create a rocket engine that relies on the heat from nuclear fission.

The nuclear rocket engine will be twice as efficient as today's chemical engines, but as easy as it seems, making small fission reactors is difficult and dangerous because there are toxic residues emitting.

In fact, space travel is risky, but NASA believes it is worth trying.

In the midst of NASA's nuclear missile program, the author of the book "Nuclear Propulsion" Bill Emerich said, "You can use rocket propulsion engines to reach Mars, but you will not be able to use these same engines to reach planets beyond the moon, so it is better to use nuclear propulsion engines ".

Although it is not necessary to use a nuclear engine to reach the moon, it would be an invaluable experience for this technology, which will surely be used in any mission to Mars.

Risks and difficulties
In an article published in the magazine "Wired" American writer Daniel Oberhaus that the nuclear engine will not be able to deliver any missile into orbit, and this is very risky, if the missile explodes with the hot nuclear reactor on the launch pad may end in a disaster parallel to the Chernobyl disaster In her horror.

Alternatively, a chemical-propelled missile could be used that would lift any nuclear-powered spacecraft into orbit.

It should be noted that the use of the enormous amount of energy produced by these reactors can halve travel time to Mars.

The writer said that this project has encountered obstacles at the technical level as well, while the process of manufacturing nuclear missile engines is very simple, the design of engines that could not withstand the heat generated by it was not easy, note that the fission reactors stationary working at about 315.55 degrees Celsius. The reactors used in rocket engines must be operated at temperatures above 2204.4 ° C.

10 years of work
Over the past decade, Emerich and a team of engineers have simulated extreme conditions within the nuclear rocket engine at the Marshall Space Mission Center.

Instead of launching a fission reaction, they used enough electricity to meet the energy needs of hundreds of US homes to heat the fuel cell by thousands of degrees.

"He tried to think of this as being like a big microwave oven," says Mr Emerich.

This project is known as the "environmental simulation of a nuclear thermonuclear missile", which was the cornerstone of NASA's quiet return to nuclear propulsion.

He and his team use the large simulation room to study how materials react to extreme heat without incurring the costs or risks of creating a complete nuclear engine, similar to what NASA did in the 1960s.

Appointment 2024
Only a few years after the inclusion of the environmental simulator of the thermonuclear missile on the Internet, NASA incorporated it into a larger program to study how a nuclear engine could be integrated with the space launch system, the next-generation heavy-launch rocket.

The writer explained that early programs laid the basis for nuclear rocket engines, while the next step for NASA was simply to develop the necessary equipment to move the engine from theory to reality.

In 2017, NASA awarded BMX Technologies a three-year, $ 19 million contract to develop fuel components and reactors for the nuclear engine.

The following year, Congress allocated $ 100 million in NASA's budget to develop nuclear propulsion technologies, and received another $ 125 million to develop nuclear propulsion.

Before this engine gets its first flight, NASA needs to reform its nuclear launch regulations.

In August, the White House issued a memo instructing NASA to develop safety protocols for operating nuclear reactors in space.

Once the instructions are adopted by NASA, the first phase of a first nuclear-powered flight will be ready in 2024, coinciding with Trump's deadline for the return of US astronauts to the moon, who might make their flight on a nuclear-propelled rocket.