NASA wants to go to Mars on a nuclear-powered rocket

NASA is committed to getting humanity all the way to the Red Planetand it thinks the best way to do that is a nuclear-powered rocket.

And so I have a new answer to what I had paint on the side of a 1970s van.

It seems roaming the surface of Mars just isn’t good enough; we need to have some face time with the little red man. NASA announced in January that it would collaborate with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop a nuclear propellant rocket that travels three times faster than traditional liquid-fueled rockets.

NBC news checked in on the project to find out how NASA and DARPA plan to use nuclear power to propel these missiles:

The program has been named DRACO, short for Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations.

The system uses high heat from a fission reactor to convert liquid propellant into a gas, which is then passed through a nozzle to power the spacecraft.

This type of propulsion can create more thrust and is at least three times more efficient than chemical rockets, according to NASA. That means less fuel needs to be carried on board, freeing up space to carry more equipment, science experiments or other cargo to the surface of Mars.

“It could completely change the game of how people think about what’s possible in space — what you can carry, how fast you can get there,” said DARPA director Stefanie Tompkins. “You have much more flexibility to get where you want, when you want.”

The scientist then calls the technology safe because it uses low-enriched uranium instead of highly enriched weapons-grade uranium. Which… sure. Why not. LEU is what goes into nuclear reactors and none of them have that once posed a health risk to humansright?

Using this form of rocket would reduce the travel time to the Red Planet from eight months to just two and a half, exposing astronauts to much less risk and cosmic radiation. It would also give them more time to focus on boots-on-the-Martian type work, and allow astronauts to carry more gear since they don’t have to lug around a ton of fuel.

The European Space Agency is also betting on nuclear power to fulfill its ambitions for deep space exploration. Nuclear power isn’t our only option for traveling deeper into the solar system; NASA is messing with it too a rotating blast rocket motoror RDRE.