The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has initiated a program to establish the readiness of nuclear propulsion technology for the Space Exploration Initiative (SEI) and Space Science missions. Nuclear Thermal Propulsion (NTP) has been identified as enabling piloted and cargo missions to Mars and also offers a significant payoff for Lunar missions. Nuclear Electric Propulsion (NEP) at 50–100 kW has been identified as enabling a number of outer planet science missions and offers significant payoff at 1–10 MW for Lunar and Mars cargo missions and at 10 s of MW may even be applicable to piloted Mars missions. The Nuclear Propulsion Program relies on many areas of technology, both nuclear and non‐nuclear. This paper focuses mainly on the nonnuclear subsystem technologies, the plan which has been developed to deal with each technology and its associated issues, and near term future plans.
NASA’s nuclear propulsion technology project
Proceedings of the tenth symposium on space nuclear power and propulsion ; 1993 ; Albuquerque, New Mexico (USA)
AIP Conference Proceedings ; 271 , 1 ; 185-197
1993-01-10
13 pages
Conference paper
Electronic Resource
English
NASA's Nuclear Propulsion Technology Project
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