NASA said on Wednesday it had selected Lockheed Martin to design, build and test a nuclear rocket that could help humans travel to Mars in about half the time compared to those currently used in spacecraft.
The contract, jointly announced with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, is a key step in the journey to a manned mission to the Red Planet. The project is known as DRACO (short for Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations) and hopes to see the launch of a nuclear-powered rocket to space as early as 2027.
“Working with DARPA and companies across the commercial space industry will enable us to accelerate the technology development we need to send humans to Mars,” Pam Melroy, the deputy administrator of NASA, said in a statement. “This demonstration will be a crucial step in meeting our Moon to Mars objectives for crew transportation into deep space.”
The trip to Mars takes between seven and nine months using current designs of rocket engines, which rely on combustion to accelerate and cruise through space. But chemical rockets are limited by how much fuel they can carry and provide a relatively low amount of thrust.
A nuclear thermal rocket would be much more efficient, NASA said, allowing spacecraft to accelerate “for extended periods and can propel a Mars mission for a fraction of the propellant of high thrust systems.”
The time spent in space is a key safety feature for a crewed mission to Mars to limit radiation. The efficiency of a nuclear rocket would also free up extra space for scientific equipment.
Officials said the reactor in the nuclear rocket would rely on a less-enriched form of uranium and only be turned on once it reached space to minimise any potential accidents.
“DRACO has already done all of our preliminary analyses across the entire spectrum of possibilities for accidents and found that we’re all the way down in the low probability and all the way down in the teeny tiny amount of release,” Tabitha Dodson, the DRACO project manager, said during a news briefing, per The New York Times.