33 million? Sounds like this project is about to overrun 20ish billion before they " find out " that they can't do it.
this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2023
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That's because it's just a grant for preliminary design and research work. They'll review it after this stage is complete to see how feasible it looks before going forward with further stages. It's not 33 million to develop a whole new kind of rocket propulsion system, that would be a ludicrously low price. It's in the article, though the headline is a bit vague on what the award actually is.
Its Lockheed, that's gonna get greenlit faster than a fly finding fresh dung
LOL, I was gonna say, $33M will get you a super nice set of wrenches and the best nuts and bolts mankind can produce.
A working nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) engine was already built in the 60s under NASA's NERVA project. It is one of the highest technological readiness level solutions we have to the dilemma of high specific impulse versus high thrust present in the current spsce engine technologies. Imo we need something like this to make manned interplanetary missions viable.
NTP was just a fachade, what NERV was actually researching was the human instrumentality project, I saw it in a robots documental
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) awarded $33.7 million to Lockheed Martin as part of the Joint Emergent Technology Supplying On-Orbit Nuclear (JETSON) effort to "mature high-power nuclear electric power and propulsion technologies and spacecraft design."
"Nuclear fission development for space applications is key to introducing technologies that could dramatically change how we move and explore in the vastness of space," Barry Miles, JETSON program manager and principal investigator at Lockheed Martin, said in a statement.
"From high-power electrical subsystem and electric propulsion to nuclear thermal propulsion or fission surface power, Lockheed Martin is focused on developing these systems with our important government agencies and industry partners," Miles added.
In addition, Westinghouse Government Services, based in South Carolina, received a contract to continue research into utilizing high-power nuclear fission systems in spacecraft.
In July, NASA and the U.S. military chose the aerospace giant to develop and launch a spacecraft to test nuclear thermal propulsion in space.
The project, known as DRACO ("Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations"), could feature a propulsion system that's a number of times more efficient than traditional chemical methods.
The original article contains 410 words, the summary contains 184 words. Saved 55%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
So after $40M more and a half decade of delays past due, we might have LM produce something with record efficiency.
Complete dead-end technologically and politically, so this is basically just a gift to Lockheed. Lobbyist deserves a promotion!
The fuck do you mean dead-end? You think we'll just keep using chemical rockets until the end of time? Nuclear propulsion is the most efficient form of propulsion we have at the moment. Iirc, nuclear engines would dramatically cut down on travel time because you can burn for much, much longer due to their efficiency. The only reason we don't really use them is because everyone loses their shit and has a panic attack the moment you float the idea of putting a nuclear reactor in space (we still use RTGs though).
Why do you think so?
JETSON aims to launch a fission reactor that will be started up once in space. The reactor will generate heat, which is then transferred to Stirling power converters to produce electricity. This can then be used to power spacecraft payloads or electric thrusters for propulsion.
I can see launching nuclear payloads being a tough sell politically but the technological principles are sound.
It's also worth noting that past mars solar panels start to be functionally useless, so we use...nuclear powered spacecraft... to generate electricity when needed and have done for half a century. It's not like nuclear stuff in space is a new idea
It's actually much much less dead-end than chemical rockets are. There's a lot of technological possibility for nuclear rockets, thanks to the energy density of nuclear power.
In theory you could even do fusion rockets in the far future, but we'd need to figure out fusion for that first.
But like, fusion rockets might be the holy grail for space travel, short of maybe antimatter rockets (but you can imagine the complications in that). This chain of technologies is absolutely something worth exploring.