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We’re building nuclear spaceships again—this time for real
The military and NASA seem serious about building demonstration hardware.
The hotter you make the exhaust gas, the more you increase specific impulse, so NTRs needed the core to operate at temperatures reaching 3,000 K—nearly 1,800 K higher than ground-based reactors. Then there was the hydrogen itself, which is extremely corrosive at these temperatures, especially when interacting with those few materials that are stable at 3,000 K. Finally, standard control rods had to go, too, because on the ground, they were gravitationally dropped into the core, and that wouldn’t work in flight. Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory proposed a few promising NTR designs that addressed all these issues in 1955 and 1956, but the program really picked up pace after it was transferred to NASA and Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in 1958, There, the idea was rebranded as NERVA, Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Applications.
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