Humanity owes a debt of gratitude to the chemical rockets that have launched satellites, astronauts, and entire space stations into space. But if we have any hope of reliably settling on other planets, those engines will likely need to be swapped out with nuclear ones.
The U.S. is very aware of the nuclear future of spaceflight—or at least it used to be. NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) were launching a nuclear thermal rocket (NTR) powered by solid uranium by 2027 called the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations, or DRACO, but that program has now been canceled under the Trump Administration.
While NTR's future is uncertain, that spacecraft’s design isn’t the only horse in the spaceflight race. For one, there’s an entire other category of nuclear propulsion known as NEP, which converts nuclear heat into electricity to power ion thrusters. But even within the NTR family, there isn’t absolute certainty about what these rockets might look like in the near future.
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