Russia has a crazy
plan to fly to Mars in 45 days using nuclear power
Seriously.
One of the reasons
space exploration is so exciting is that there are so many possibilities – like
powering a rocket to Mars in record time using nuclear reactions. That's the
rather outlandish plan being put together by Russian scientists, and
it's one of the first to propose a solution to getting home from the Red Planet
once we get there.
Existing schemes,
including the ones scheduled by NASA for the 2030s,
don't factor in the fuel or resources for a return trip, which means the first
human settlers would have to live out the rest of their days there. Previous
proposals have also reckoned with a journey time of something like 18 months,
which means astronauts are more at risk of contracting various diseases and
ailments along the way.
It's actually Russia's
national nuclear corporation, Rosatom, that has the big idea for a
nuclear-powered spaceship, and it's not a completely new concept either: both
Russia and the United States were working on similar systems during the Cold
War of the 1960s and onwards, although their efforts were focused on
lightweight orbital satellites rather than space vehicles to take us to Mars
and back again.
One of the biggest
drawbacks is going to be the cost. "A nuclear contraption should not be
too far off, not too complicated," Nikolai Sokov, senior fellow at the
James Martin Centre for Nonproliferation Studies in California, told Wired. "The really
expensive thing will be designing a ship around these things."
While Rosatom's
representatives haven't gone into detail about how the company's technology
will work, it's likely to be some form of thermal fission, where the heat of
splitting atoms are used to burn hydrogen or another chemical, providing
propulsion for the spaceship. It's similar in principle to chemical propulsion,
where one chemical (the oxidiser) burns another (the propellant) to power a
vehicle along.
The key difference
with chemical propulsion is you need more and more fuel, which makes your
vehicle heavier and heavier, a problem that thermal fission would solve. If the
Russian team is successful in its aims (and that's a big, huge "if"),
the research could help improve orbiting satellite technology and perhaps
contribute to the creation of a space junk collector on the edges of Earth's
atmosphere.
"A vehicle
equipped with a nuclear engine is expected to have 30 times the power reserve
of conventional spaceships," explains Rosatom. "The designs we are
developing will enable mankind to build spaceships that can address all the
space challenges of the 21st century, such as cargo transport, removal of space
debris, asteroid impact avoidance, etc."
A prototype will be
ready for flight testing in 2018, according to the company, if they can get the
funds together. Nick Stockton from Wired reports that Rosatom has only
budgeted 15 billon rubles for the project (about US$700 million), which he
calls "eyebrow-raisingly cheap for a 15-year long space project". For
comparison, he adds, NASA's Space Launch System is projected to cost
nearly $10 billion.
We'll just have to wait and see what those
Russian rocket scientists have up their sleeves in the next few years.