Russia Winning Nuclear Space Race

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Wired reports: The Russian space agency may build a nuclear-powered spacecraft with the blessing of the country’s leader, Russian and international media reported Thursday.

The craft would cost $600 million, and Russian scientists claim it could be ready as early as 2012.

“The idea [of nuclear-powered spaceflight] has bright prospects, and if Russia could stage a breakthrough, it could become our main contribution to any future international program of deep-space exploration,” Andrei Ionin, an independent Moscow-based space expert, told Christian Science Monitor.

Building a nuclear-powered spacecraft is feasible, said Patrick McDaniel, a nuclear engineer and co-director of the University of New Mexico’s Institute for Space and Nuclear Power Studies, but probably not in the short time frame that the Russians have proposed.

“To have a test article that they could test on the ground, that’s very reasonable,” McDaniel said. “To have a completed system, that’s highly unlikely.”

If the spaceship actually gets built, it would complete a half-century quest to bring nuclear power to space propulsion, beginning with a 1947 report by North American Aviation to the Air Force.

It’s not hard to see why engineers would want to use nuclear power. Fission reactors provide a lot of power for their size, which is a key attribute in designing space systems. One engineer claims nuclear rockets are inherently twice as efficient as their chemical brethren. Their attributes could have increased the exploration range of the space program, nuclear propulsion advocates argue, allowing us to get to more interesting places.

“We could have done a lot more things in space. We could have gone more places,” McDaniel said of nuclear rocket research. “It’s highly likely we would have gone to Mars.”

The current plans to potentially return to Mars do not include a nuclear rocket, but several decades of plans from the 1950s through the 1980s just assumed that nuclear power would be a part of the effort to reach the Red Planet.

Toward that end, the Air Force, which preceded NASA in managing space programs, created Project Rover in conjunction with Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The goal of Rover was to develop a reactor that could be used for propulsion. Various incarnations of the reactor the scientists developed, called Kiwi, were tested at Jackass Flats, Nevada (see video). The idea behind the reactor was to use the heat generated by fission to heat hydrogen, which would expand, generating the force to push the rocket.

None of the reactors ran for more than eight minutes, but they were considered to have met their goals. Technically, they worked.

Though the exhaust from the rockets is radioactive, the first serious program to build a nuclear-powered rocket, Project Rover, enjoyed broad government support, even after it hit some cost-overrun problems in the early 1960s.

“Everyone likes Rover—the White House, the Atomic Energy Commission, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration,” Time magazine wrote in 1962. “Senator [Clinton] Anderson insists that nuclear-powered rocketry is as important to U.S. security as the hydrogen bomb.”

Beginning in July 1958, with the creation of NASA, work on nuclear rockets became the provenance of the Space Nuclear Propulsion Office. They began to consolidate the various programs, creating the Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application program.

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