US military gives Lockheed Martin $33.7 million to develop nuclear spacecraft

Comments

• Hotdogman@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  33 million? Sounds like this project is about to overrun 20ish billion before they " find out " that they can’t do it.

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  • Ranvier@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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.

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    • n3m37h@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Its Lockheed, that’s gonna get greenlit faster than a fly finding fresh dung

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    • shalafi@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      LOL, I was gonna say, $33M will get you a super nice set of wrenches and the best nuts and bolts mankind can produce.

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• elderflower@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  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.

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  • Siegfried@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    NTP was just a fachade, what NERV was actually researching was the human instrumentality project, I saw it in a robots documental

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• errer@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Complete dead-end technologically and politically, so this is basically just a gift to Lockheed. Lobbyist deserves a promotion!

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  • MossyFeathers@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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).

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  • ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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.

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    • echo64@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      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

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  • SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    It’s actually mich 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.

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• saltesc@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  So after $40M more and a half decade of delays past due, we might have LM produce something with record efficiency.

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  • Kbobabob@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    we might have LM produce something with record efficiency.

    Narrator: They didn’t

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• Nudding@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Humanity shouldn’t spread through the galaxy. We’ve already raped one planet into an extinction event.

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