NASA wants to send nuclear rockets to the Moon and Mars

Enlarge / Nuclear rockets could be used to cut the travel time to Mars in half. (credit: NASA)

Just north of the Tennessee River near Huntsville, Alabama, there's a six-story rocket test stand in a small clearing of loblolly pines. It's here, in a secluded corner of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, that the US Army and NASA performed critical tests during the development of the Redstone rocket. In 1958, this rocket became the first to detonate a nuclear weapon; three years later, it carried the first American into space.

The tangled history of nukes and space is again resurfacing, just up the road from the Redstone test stand. This time NASA engineers want to create something deceptively simple: a rocket engine powered by nuclear fission.

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