"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."Ī prototype will be ready for flight testing in 2018, according to the company, if they can get the funds together. "A vehicle equipped with a nuclear engine is expected to have 30 times the power reserve of conventional spaceships," explains Rosatom. If the Russian team is successful in its aims (and that's a big, huge "if"), the research could help improve orbiting satellite technology and perhaps contribute to the creation of a space junk collector on the edges of Earth's atmosphere. The key difference with chemical propulsion is you need more and more fuel, which makes your vehicle heavier and heavier, a problem that thermal fission would solve. It's similar in principle to chemical propulsion, where one chemical (the oxidiser) burns another (the propellant) to power a vehicle along. While Rosatom's representatives haven't gone into detail about how the company's technology will work, it's likely to be some form of thermal fission, where the heat of splitting atoms are used to burn hydrogen or another chemical, providing propulsion for the spaceship. "The really expensive thing will be designing a ship around these things." "A nuclear contraption should not be too far off, not too complicated," Nikolai Sokov, senior fellow at the James Martin Centre for Nonproliferation Studies in California, told Wired. One of the biggest drawbacks is going to be the cost. It's actually Russia's national nuclear corporation, Rosatom, that has the big idea for a nuclear-powered spaceship, and it's not a completely new concept either: both Russia and the United States were working on similar systems during the Cold War of the 1960s and onwards, although their efforts were focused on lightweight orbital satellites rather than space vehicles to take us to Mars and back again.
Previous proposals have also reckoned with a journey time of something like 18 months, which means astronauts are more at risk of contracting various diseases and ailments along the way. Existing schemes, including the ones scheduled by NASA for the 2030s, don't factor in the fuel or resources for a return trip, which means the first human settlers would have to live out the rest of their days there.
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