NASA announces nuclear-powered Mars mission by 2028

Yeah ok. How’s that 2023 Artemis mission shaping up?

> NASA has announced it will launch a nuclear-powered spacecraft to Mars before the end of 2028. The effort would mark a world first—no interplanetary spacecraft mission has ever been powered by nuclear propulsion before—and a massive boost for potential missions that would go farther out into space and travel faster than traditional liquid-fueled craft could manage.

> The space agency plans to the launch the spacecraft, called Space Reactor-1 Freedom, to the Red Planet, where it will deploy several helicopters to explore the surface. The helicopters, NASA said in a statement, will be modeled on Ingenuity, which flew as part of the Perseverance Mars rover’s mission on the planet.

>According to NASA, the mission will prove nuclear propulsion can power spacecraft “and activate the industrial base for future fission power systems across propulsion, surface, and long-duration missions.” These could include missions to planets and other bodies in the outer solar system. Currently, exploring these distant worlds would be impossible with traditional craft, which would require massive amounts of liquid fuel to travel such distances. Only spacecraft that are small enough to be battery- or solar-powered, such as the Voyager and Juno missions, have reached these outer realms of our solar system.

>Nuclear propulsion has long been touted as the solution to this problem, but it has never been proven to work in a mission. It is unclear what propulsion design NASA would use to test the system or if there will be any collaboration with industry.

“Space reactor-1 Freedom”

God, a wealth of names to pick and _that’s_ what they settled on?

NASA just got done binging for all mankind

I don’t think we should just be brainstorming random interplanetary science mission concepts and slamming them into the budget while picking some enormously unrealistic timeline out of thin air. This has reduced a lot of whatever confidence I had in Isaacman as an administrator. Interplanetary science missions should be founded on a firm science and engineering basis and they should go through a competitive review process. That’s substantially why we have had so much success over the years and have achieved so much great science. These aren’t just toys to play with, these are serious endeavors.

Is it nuclear-electric or nuclear thermal like the cancelled DRACO NASA-DARPA demo?

I very, very, very strongly doubt that, given they cancelled DRACO at the start of 2025, which was meant to be the big leap in nuclear rockets, approximately 30 minutes before it was meant to launch.

I know DRACO was NTP, and this is NEP, but that’s still really not a good sign.

(Full disclosure, I was a scientist working on NTP that lost their funding, so I’m very bitter)

It seems to me that NASA is starting with a date, 2028, and then defining new or modified projects that will have its first meaningful launch by that date. It is almost like doing it prior to the end of 2028 increases their chance of getting the project approved. I wonder which person, with the power to affect NASA’s budget, would desire an expensive NASA project complete a major, “hey look what I did”, milestone before the end of 20208. A real puzzler.

Yeah, me too. I’m planning one as well. Do I get an article?

It doesn’t surprise me when the remaining Pu238 supply for RTGs is basically nonexistent at this point.

Oh I am sure this will happen no doubt.

They are trying to get our best and brightest killed tragically in front of the whole world. Everything Trump touches dies.

Announcing grand plans is all fine and good, but the real trick is getting Congress to fund it.

And that will be the true test of Jared Isaacman’s administration.

Okay, no. I don’t believe it. Sorry, NASA.

Absolute farce. We have got to stop handing our future in space over to payment processing tycoons whose worldview seems to be driven by a semi-literate reading of sci-fi Spark Notes.

Nasa is lost and seems to have no direction. Picking new targets every 6 months is bad. Picking new targets and with new tech in short test frames is really bad. New-clear propulsion.

On the upside, it will be super-pretty when that rocket explodes on launch.

This idea is from the same people thinking data centers in space is also a good idea

All announcements, no actions. Especially with dates the current administration won’t have to deal with.

Uh, no. There is a reason we haven’t done this before. A nuclear space craft would be the world’s largest dirty bomb. If the craft fails, that’s an expensive loss, but if it explodes as part of that failure, that’s radioactive material getting spread around the world.