US military gives Lockheed Martin $33.7 million to develop nuclear spacecraft
US military gives Lockheed Martin $33.7 million to develop nuclear spacecraft
The aerospace giant will develop power and propulsion systems under its JETSON project.
US military gives Lockheed Martin $33.7 million to develop nuclear spacecraft::The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory just awarded $33.7 million to Lockheed Martin to advance the development of space nuclear propulsion and power tech.
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Complete dead-end technologically and politically, so this is basically just a gift to Lockheed. Lobbyist deserves a promotion!
The fuck do you mean dead-end? You think we'll just keep using chemical rockets until the end of time? Nuclear propulsion is the most efficient form of propulsion we have at the moment. Iirc, nuclear engines would dramatically cut down on travel time because you can burn for much, much longer due to their efficiency. The only reason we don't really use them is because everyone loses their shit and has a panic attack the moment you float the idea of putting a nuclear reactor in space (we still use RTGs though).
Why do you think so?
JETSON aims to launch a fission reactor that will be started up once in space. The reactor will generate heat, which is then transferred to Stirling power converters to produce electricity. This can then be used to power spacecraft payloads or electric thrusters for propulsion.
I can see launching nuclear payloads being a tough sell politically but the technological principles are sound.
It's also worth noting that past mars solar panels start to be functionally useless, so we use...nuclear powered spacecraft... to generate electricity when needed and have done for half a century. It's not like nuclear stuff in space is a new idea
It's not like nuclear stuff in space is a new idea
We even detonated atomic bombs in space
It's actually much much less dead-end than chemical rockets are. There's a lot of technological possibility for nuclear rockets, thanks to the energy density of nuclear power.
In theory you could even do fusion rockets in the far future, but we'd need to figure out fusion for that first.
But like, fusion rockets might be the holy grail for space travel, short of maybe antimatter rockets (but you can imagine the complications in that). This chain of technologies is absolutely something worth exploring.