Are nuclear rockets the future of space travel? Or will the anti-nuke crowd win
out?

"During an Oct. 9 Aviation Week webinar moderated by Space Editor Irene Klotz,
three former NASA administrators agreed that the U.S. needs to harness nuclear
technology to propel humans beyond low Earth orbit.

With the rapid development of the Chinese space program, the U.S. does not have
the luxury of waiting to develop new technology, said Dan Goldin, who led NASA
during three presidential administrations from 1992 to 2001. “We’ve been using
the same damn rocket technology since Apollo. It’s time to grow up and say the
magic term ‘nuclear.’ There I said it, ‘nuclear,’” Goldin said. “We’re going to
need nuclear power on planetary bodies. We’re going to need nuclear power for
propulsion. And if America intends to be a world leader, we’re going to have to
grow up and learn to live with nuclear.”

The U.S. has been exploring the technology for a long time, points out Sean
O’Keefe, NASA administrator during George W. Bush’s presidency in 2001-05. But
he says the nation needs to pick up the pace. Project Prometheus, an in-space
propulsion effort started in 2003 to develop radioisotope power systems and
nuclear power and propulsion systems. The program was designed to support a
space science mission to study the icy moons of Jupiter, but it was scrapped in
favor of higher priorities.

The technology in Prometheus “has been developed now to a much higher extent,
but nowhere near as quickly as we needed to see significant changes over the
last 15 years,” O’Keefe said. “We’re in a better place now in terms of
developing that technology that has been used on a limited basis in the past—to
seriously examining that as an in-space propulsion capacity. We just need to do
it a hell of a lot faster.”"

See:

https://aviationweek.com/defense-spa...sion-transport