On Jun/25/2018 at 7:27 AM, Jeff Findley wrote :
In article m,
says...

On Sun, 24 Jun 2018, Jeff Findley wrote:

"The international nuclear technology company BWX Technologies,
Inc. opened a Huntsville office Thursday to begin developing
products for the aerospace and military including a nuclear
propulsion system that could send rockets to Mars."

""We're talking about something very different here," Geveden
said. "We're talking about an active nuclear reactor to run
hydrogen across the core and expand it out through a nozzle.""

See:
https://www.al.com/business/index.ss...y_will_de.html

Millions to assure Mars won't get contaminated with germs
and not a dollar to protect Mars from nuclear pollution.

I guess we might as well stay home and never bother becoming a space-
fairing species then. Goodbye too all humans when the next big
extinction event happens.

The next big extinction is already happening
faster than we'll ever get to Mars.

Bull****. We'll almost certainly be landing people on Mars in the next
10-20 years. The chance that humans will become extinct in that same
time period is quite small, but admittedly non-zero.

Yes but the next big extinction has been happening for the past several
decades. As you say we are almost certainly going to Mars soon. But that
doesn't mean the next big extinction didn't start way before we will go
to Mars.


Alain Fournier