Report: NASA’s Only Realistic Path for Humans on Mars is Nuclear Propulsion

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Report: NASA's only realistic path for humans on Mars is nuclear propulsion:

A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine offers some answers about two such ways. Conducted at the request of NASA, a broad-based committee of experts assessed the viability of two means of propulsion-nuclear thermal and nuclear electric-for a human mission launching to Mars in 2039.

"One of the primary takeaways of the report is that if we want to send humans to Mars, and we want to do so repeatedly and in a sustainable way, nuclear space propulsion is on the path," said Bobby Braun, director for planetary science at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and co-chair of the committee that wrote the report, in an interview.

The committee was not asked to recommend a particular technology, each of which rely on nuclear reactions but work differently. Nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) involves a rocket engine in which a nuclear reactor replaces the combustion chamber and burns liquid hydrogen as a fuel. Nuclear electric propulsion (NEP) converts heat from a fission reactor to electrical power, like a power plant on Earth, and then uses this energy to produce thrust by accelerating an ionized propellant, such as xenon.

"If you look at the committee's recommendations for NTP, we felt that an aggressive program, built on the foundational work that's been accomplished recently, could get us there," Braun said of the Mars 2039 goal. "For NEP, we felt that it was unclear if such a program could get us there, but we did not conclude that it could not get us there."

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