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Anew type of nuclear thermal propulsion reactor fuel has been successfully tested at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, with hopes that the fuel could take humans to Mars in the not-too-distant future. Getting to the Red Planet, as things currently stand, will be a long-haul mission. Mars is, on average, 140 million miles from Earth. "Rather than a three-day lunar trip, astronauts bound for Mars would be leaving our planet for roughly three years," NASA explains, adding that such a mission would require the crew to be self-sufficient for long periods of the trip. "Facing a communication delay of up...

Conventional jet engines generate thrust by mixing fuel with compressed air, then igniting it. As the burning mixture rapidly expands, it gets blasted out of the back of the engine, propelling the craft forward. On the other hand, a plasma jet engine does away with the standard air and fuel mixture. Instead, it makes use of electricity to compress and excite gas into a plasma — an extremely hot, dense ionised state comparable with the insides of a fusion reactor or a star — then generate an electromagnetic field from it. Plasma engines have remained in experimental stages for quite...

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Flying saucers may soon be more fact than mere science fiction. University of Florida mechanical and aerospace engineering associate professor Subrata Roy has submitted a patent application for a circular, spinning aircraft design reminiscent of the spaceships seen in countless Hollywood films. Roy, however, calls his design a “wingless electromagnetic air vehicle,” or WEAV. The proposed prototype is small – the aircraft will measure less than six inches across – and will be efficient enough to be powered by on-board batteries. Roy said the design can be scaled up and theoretically should work in a much larger...

Imagine a car that accelerates from zero to sixty in 250 feet, and then rockets to 120 miles per hour in just one more inch. That's essentially what a collaboration of accelerator physicists has accomplished, using electrons for their racecars and plasma for the afterburners. Because electrons already travel at near light's speed in an accelerator, the physicists actually doubled the energy of the electrons, not their speed. The researchers—from the Department of Energy's Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, and the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering—published their...

The 'double layer thruster' is a new kind of ion drive which could give much more power than existing versions. It works by accelerating charged particles between two layers of argon plasma, gas where the atoms have been stripped of electrons. Esa says it has 'proven the principle', and will proceed with simulations and perhaps bigger prototypes. Esa already uses an ion drive on its Smart 1 Moon probe, and the US space agency Nasa deployed one on Deep Space 1, which flew out to Comet Borrelly in 2001.

A team of engineers and scientists led by NASA have begun investigating the physics and performance of magnetic nozzles -- innovative devices that could support development of plasma-based propulsion systems.

SEATTLE – Sitting in the cramped coach section of a transcontinental airliner for five or six hours can be trying enough. But consider NASA's "reference mission" to Mars. Astronauts will be cooped up in their craft for up to six months each way as they travel to and from the Red Planet. Robert Winglee and his colleagues would like to give these future explorers a break. Inspired by the sun's influence on Earth, the team is developing a unique approach to space propulsion. The craft it envisions hurtles through space on sails made of magnetic fields. The sails billow under...

Superfast VASIMR Rocket in Funding Limbo By Leonard David Senior Space Writer posted: 07:00 am ET 07 August 2002 Trimming travel time between Earth and various space targets is crucial to keeping human and robotic surveys of the solar system prospering into the 21st Century.Faster rockets cut back on an astronaut's radiation intake. Being a space speedster may also reduce loss of bone and muscle mass, as well as limit circulatory changes due to prolonged microgravity exposure.One approach to express lane rocketry is tagged the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR). With VASIMR's oomph, a 10-month one-way trek to Mars...

Summary - (Sep 21, 2004) NASA has chosen Northrop Grumman Space Technology to build its upcoming Prometheus Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (JIMO) spacecraft, and awarded them a $400 million contract to cover costs up to 2008. JIMO will use a nuclear-powered ion engine to go into orbit around each of Jupiter's icy moons: Callisto, Ganymede, and Europa. Once in orbit, the spacecraft would be able to examine each of the moons in great detail with a suite of instruments to try and understand their composition, history, and if there could be conditions for life. Full Story - NASA's Jet Propulsion...

PASADENA, Calif. (AP) - Northrop Grumman Space Technology has been selected to help NASA design a nuclear-powered spacecraft to orbit and explore three moons of Jupiter that may have oceans beneath their icy surfaces. The $400 million contract with the Redondo Beach, Calif.-based unit of Northrop Grumman covers work through mid-2008, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said Monday. The Prometheus Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter spacecraft will be designed to explore Callisto, Ganymede and Europa sometime in the next decade, after launching in 2012 or later. Scientists want to know what the big moons are made of, their history and whether the...

ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico – A NASA project to Jupiter and several of its moons may depend on the U.S. Navy to provide the nuclear know-how in building a reactor for deep space exploration. The Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (JIMO) program is a flagship mission under NASA’s Project Prometheus – a multi-pronged effort to develop near- and long-term nuclear electric power and propulsion technologies. JIMO would be powered by a compact nuclear reactor and propelled by a set of ion engines that expel electrically charged particles to generate thrust. NASA and the scientific community are considering adding a Europa lander to...

Project Prometheus, NASA’s multibillion-dollar nuclear power and propulsion initiative, has a new home inside the U.S. space agency. Begun as the Nuclear Systems Initiative in 2002, the program was given a new name in 2003, a bigger budget and its first mission: the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (JIMO). Now, with an ambitious new space exploration agenda handed down by the White House, NASA is making more changes to Project Prometheus. JIMO’s launch date is slipping and responsibility for developing the nuclear systems NASA says it needs to kick solar system exploration into high gear is being given to the newly...

PASADENA, California, (AFP) - Nuclear power may give NASA (news - web sites)'s long-range missions the speed and range that combustion engines cannot, but research is sputtering for lack of funds. NASA's head of the Prometheus program said the agency has three billion dollars for the next five years. "Beyond that, we know we need more money," Al Newhouse told AFP. "We are at a very early stage of this program. It has been in existence for slighty under a year." Nuclear propulsion first became a NASA budget line item in 2003, with 125 million dollars. NASA requested 279 million...

WASHINGTON -- NASA will fund 10 research proposals in the first series of contracts awarded under Project Prometheus, the agency’s effort to develop nuclear power and propulsion systems for spacecraft. The 10 proposals are intended to develop new methods and technologies for converting heat from radioisotope fuel into electrical power, NASA announced. Nuclear power has the potential to dramatically reduce interplanetary travel time while boosting the amount of power available for science instruments. "NASA is laying the foundation for several technology paths that could enable entirely new classes of missions, from networked science stations on Mars to small spacecraft capable...

NISKAYUNA -- The plan to send a manned space mission to Mars apparently doomed research on nuclear propulsion being carried out at Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory. Advertisement KAPL employees were told late last week that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was ending the $65 million program to develop a nuclear-electric propulsion system as it reorders its priorities. The Prometheus project, as it is called, will undergo a "substantial reduction," KAPL officials said this week, in part so money can be spent on developing the Crew Exploration Vehicle that will be used to send humans back to the Moon and...

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has pulled the plug on a $65 million nuclear propulsion research program at Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory, leaving 150 employees in limbo. "NASA and Naval Reactors have mutually agreed to terminate their partnership to work on Prometheus," as the program was called, a Knolls spokeswoman said Friday afternoon. "NASA has been changing its priorities. I don't have many details on this," she added. Lockheed Martin Corp. operates Knolls under contract with the U.S. Department of Energy. Knolls employs 2,700 people, including 1,500 engineers, at its laboratory in Niskayuna and at another site in West...

WASHINGTON -- NASA sent Congress a revised spending plan for 2005 that would significantly cut the Project Prometheus nuclear power and propulsion program, cancel a host of international space station-based biological and physical research activities, and postpone some space science missions, including two advanced space telescopes and a Mars science lander slated to launch in 2009. The cuts were necessary, according to NASA, to pay the remaining $287 million tab for preparing the space shuttle for its return to flight, to make a substantial down payment on a potential Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission, to accommodate $400 million worth of...

NASA’s Prometheus program to employ nuclear reactors in space is a work in progress – viewed as a key building block of the space agency’s vision for space exploration.

This is an excerpt of a very lengthy explanation of what a nuclear SSTO (Single Stage To Orbit) fully reusable rocket would look like. The full article can be found at the link above. In this section I describe a huge nuclear powered rocket launcher. I will repeat and expand upon many of the points I made above, because I don't want to throw cryptic acronyms around. I want people to understand just how powerful we can make this rocket if we decide to do it. The most important difference between our new booster and the Saturn V is...

Nuclear power would allow missions to orbit - not merely fly by The US space agency (Nasa) is progressing with ambitious plans to explore the Solar System using nuclear power. Their hope, eventually, is to use electricity generated by nuclear power to propel a space probe and power its instruments on a voyage to the icy moons of Jupiter, satellites that just possibly might harbour life beneath their ice. Before then, nuclear technology could be proved with a less ambitious mission, perhaps a nuclear-powered probe to the Moon. As long ago as 1907, just two years after Einstein discovered his...