NASA to collaborate with DARPA to test nuclear-powered spacecraft by 2027
NASA will partner with the US military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop the nuclear thermal propulsion engine and launch it into space, NASA administrator Bill Nelson said. The project has been named the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations or DRACO.
FollowNASA Administrator Charles Bolden announced that the United States plans to test a spacecraft engine powered by nuclear fission by 2027 as part of a long-term effort to demonstrate more efficient ways of sending future passengers to Mars.
During a conference in National Harbor, Maryland, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said that the organisation will work with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a nuclear thermal propulsion engine and launch it into orbit as early as 2027.
Nuclear thermal propulsion, which produces thrust by heating a hydrogen propellant in a nuclear fission reactor, has been the subject of years of study by the United States Space Agency. Compared to chemical rocket engines, this technique is expected to be far more effective.
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According to NASA officials, nuclear thermal propulsion is necessary for human space travel beyond the moon. With this technology, they predict that a trip to Mars from Earth would take just around four months, as opposed to roughly nine months with a conventional, chemically fuelled engine.
This would lessen the amount of food and other supplies required for a voyage to Mars while also decreasing the length of time humans spend in deep space radiation.
Officials from DARPA and NASA have asserted that the demonstration scheduled for 2027, which is a component of an ongoing DARPA research programme that NASA is now joining, may also have an impact on the objectives of the US Space Force, which has proposed deploying nuclear reactor-powered spacecraft capable of repositioning additional satellites in orbit close to the moon.
DARPA provided funds to General Atomics, Lockheed Martin, and Jeff Bezos' aerospace company Blue Origin in 2021 to investigate nuclear reactor and spacecraft designs. The budget for the joint NASA-DARPA project is 110 million USD for FY2023, and through FY2027, it is expected to increase by the hundreds of millions of dollars.
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