Russia Plans Nuclear-Powered Spaceship To Get To Mars In 45 DaysRob Waugh's Yahoo Blog 17 minutes ago
Russia is planning an outlandish-sounding nuclear-powered spacecraft which it claims could travel to Mars in just 45 days.
The plan would have one key advantage over current ideas for how to get to Mars - it wouldn’t be a one-way trip.
The plan was dreamed up by Russia’s national nuclear authority, Rosatom - and builds on Cold War plans for nuclear-powered satellites.
The difference with this plan is that there would be people on board - alongside a nuclear reactor - while it blasts into space.
Rosatom told Wired, ‘A vehicle equipped with a nuclear engine is expected to have 30 times the power reserve of conventional spaceships.
‘The designs we are developing will enable mankind to build spaceships that can address all the space challenges of the 21st century, such as cargo transport, removal of space debris, asteroid impact avoidance, etc.’
Rosatom hasn’t revealed how such a craft might work, but experts imagine that the cosmonauts would be hurled towards Mars by a mechanism such as heating hydrogen in a thermal fission reactor.
The big question is whether Russia can afford such a machine.
‘A nuclear contraption should not be too far off, not too complicated,’ said Nikolai Sokov, senior fellow at the James Martin Centre for Nonproliferation Studies in California.
‘The really expensive thing will be designing a ship around these things.’
http://news.yahoo.com/russia-plans-nuclear-powered-spaceship-to-get-to-154758593.html
I suppose if they worked out assembling a big ship in orbit, this is doable - I fancy the reactor in question would have to be
a lot bigger than a submarine reactor, and probably not launchable in one piece. Have fun with that.
