The US government is taking a serious step toward space-based nuclear propulsion
The US government is taking a serious step toward space-based nuclear propulsion
"NASA is looking to go to Mars with this system."
Four years from now, if all goes well, a nuclear-powered rocket engine will launch into space for the first time. The rocket itself will be conventional, but the payload boosted into orbit will be a different matter.
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Sounds risky AF
- If the rocket explodes, nuclear fuel could fall back to earth
- If not de-orbited properly, the nuclear fuel could end up scattered across a country - This already happened... multiple times... in 1973 1977, 1983
- If something goes wrong in orbit, now we have radioactive space junk... numerous accidents have already happened many times
The higher orbit should mitigate most of those issues. There's more space, so a dead craft is less of an issue. It takes long enough to reenter that most of the radioactivity will have decayed. The biggest issue would be a launch failure.
The biggest hazard is launching the payload, if it fails it falls out over a large area causing contamination of the nuclear fuel. The high orbit of the test vehicle lowers the risks for the other outcomes you identified, and they are planned to remain in these so called "disposal orbits" for many hundreds of years. Things can get very very far apart in space. The Russian recon satellites were operated in low earth orbit and their failures were well documented and even attempted to mitigate by the soviets, though they did fail with very bad consequences at least three times.
As with any technological advancement , there are risks, but if humanity is ever intending to become a spacefairing species, we will have to make peace with nuclear energy. It’s the only technology that comes anywhere close to making interplanetary travel feasible at large scale.