US military gives Lockheed Martin $33.7 million to develop nuclear spacecraft
US military gives Lockheed Martin $33.7 million to develop nuclear spacecraft
The aerospace giant will develop power and propulsion systems under its JETSON project.
US military gives Lockheed Martin $33.7 million to develop nuclear spacecraft::The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory just awarded $33.7 million to Lockheed Martin to advance the development of space nuclear propulsion and power tech.
33 million? Sounds like this project is about to overrun 20ish billion before they " find out " that they can't do it.
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.
LOL, I was gonna say, $33M will get you a super nice set of wrenches and the best nuts and bolts mankind can produce.
Its Lockheed, that's gonna get greenlit faster than a fly finding fresh dung
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
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).
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.
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.
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Humanity shouldn't spread through the galaxy. We've already raped one planet into an extinction event.