Posted on 10/28/2009 9:39:49 PM PDT by bogusname
FRYAZINO (Moscow Region), October 28 (RIA Novosti) - The Russian Federal Space Agency Roscosmos has developed a design for a piloted spacecraft powered by a nuclear engine, the head of the agency said on Wednesday.
"The project is aimed at implementing large-scale space exploration programs," Anatoly Perminov said at a meeting of the commission on the modernization of the Russian economy.
He added that the development of Megawatt-class nuclear space power systems (MCNSPS) for manned spacecraft was crucial for Russia if the country wanted to maintain a competitive edge in the space race, including the exploration of the Moon and Mars.
Perminov said that the draft design of the spacecraft would be finalized by 2012, and the financing for further development in the next nine years would require an investment of at least 17 billion rubles (over $580 million).
Anatoly Koroteyev, president of the Russian Academy of Cosmonautics and head of the Keldysh research center, earlier said that the key scientific and technical problem in sending manned missions to the Moon and Mars was the development of new propulsion systems and energy supplies with a high degree of energy-mass efficiency.
The current capabilities of the Russian space industry are clearly insufficient either to set up a permanent base on the Moon or accomplish an independent manned mission to Mars, he said.
Ping.
Is that the nuclear detonation idea, or something else entirely?
In 1963, the United States developed the NERVA project.The goal of the NERVA program was to take the graphite-based nuclear reactor built at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (LASL) under the Rover program, which had begun in 1956, and create a functioning rocket engine.
The price looks right.
Maybe the USA could use nukular for electricity for our new cars.
Of course, there is not any place to find plutonium or discharge the deadly waste
The report for years was that Russia tried this once before and many of their top scientists suddenly went missing after a rather big explosion.
This KIWI-B type reactor was deliberately destroyed on January 1965 by subjecting it to a fast excursion (Prompt Criticality). This test was intended to confirm theoretical models of transient behaviour.
Hmm, that would be nice. :)
They do not have the scientists to pull it off. They rather work for Iran, Syria,North Korea and Pakistan where they are paid very well.
A coal power plant releases 100 times as much radiation as a nuclear power plant of the same wattage.
We have been using technology to mitigate the dangers of Radioactive waste successfully for some time now. It just takes too long, and costs too much.
I don’t doubt that the entire Planet will using Nuclear energy, as we now do fossil fuels, within the next 50-100 years.
It really burns my biscuits that we aren’t leading the way into this age, the Europeans and Japanese are.
That is exactly the way I feel. We should be way ahead in all of this.
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