DARPA will develop a nuclear rocket engine

Agency DARPA in 2020 plans to begin work on the creation of a nuclear rocket engine . The task is to develop such an engine that could be used for the movement of space transporters within the lunar orbit. Financing of the project is $ 10 million, and it is called ROAR (Reactor On A Rocket).

The US military (in any case, those related to this project) believe that nuclear reactors will provide an opportunity to establish an effective system for the movement of spacecraft. At the same time, the operating time of the nuclear engine will be somewhat larger than the standard engines used now.

The calculation is based on the fact that the consumption of the working fluid will go slower. Well, as the working fluid will use liquid gas, possibly hydrogen. The working fluid inside the engine heats up, there is a release through the nozzle that moves the spacecraft forward. This makes it possible to significantly increase the efficiency of using nuclear fuel. In turn, this means that the size of the rocket can be reduced, and the hours of flight can be reduced.
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The fuel for the nuclear engine will be uranium, where the content of the U-235 isotope is more than 5% but less than 20%. Modern submarines with a nuclear reactor use fuel with highly enriched uranium, the percentage of which is up to 90%. But at the NPP, low enriched uranium is used (only 3-5%).

The development of the nuclear engine is scheduled for 2020 because up to this point a number of research projects are planned. Some of them are devoted to the creation of technologies that are planned to be used in the reactor. The project can be represented as a Lego constructor, for which some of the elements are missing. Unfortunately, there is a start date, but the planned end of the project is not indicated - so the development can be carried out for many years.

As for the idea of ​​using a nuclear engine in space, it belongs not to DARPA, but to NASA. The agency, together with several partners, has been developing since the mid-20th century. Conducted research on the creation of aircraft with a nuclear rocket launcher in the USSR. They did not receive development either in the USA or in the USSR for three main reasons. The first is the high risk of an accident, which, if there is a nuclear reactor on board, can lead to the most dire consequences. The second is purely technical difficulties in creating such a spacecraft. The third is the need to create a massive radiation protection for the crew.

However, in the middle of the 20th century, developers tried to solve the problem of creating a device that would rise from the surface of the Earth. Now we are talking about starting already from orbit. The spacecraft will be launched into orbit by conventional chemical-fueled launch vehicles. In principle, it is possible to create an apparatus that would start from the surface of the planet on nuclear fuel, but here there are much more difficulties than the case of orbital work.

In addition, scientists have previously tried to create a nuclear electromotive installation. In this case, the reactor provides the generation of electricity that is supplied to electric rocket engines (they can be plasma or ion). Now it is precisely the nuclear rocket engine that is being developed, whose working fluid enters the reactor, is heated and ejected through a nozzle.

Work is now being carried out by other organizations, for example, BWXT Nuclear Energy. This company is the successor of Babcock & Wilcox, which built the world's first nuclear reactors and nuclear submarines. In recent years, the company's specialists have been studying the reliability of nuclear rocket engines.

The advantage of a nuclear engine can also be called the fact that the design of the reactor reduces the amount of fuel required to perform pulse maneuvers. The engine can be restarted several times. The astronauts will be in the compartment protected from radiation - of course, if we talk about manned spacecraft.

DARPA is a very multilateral organization. So, recently it was reported that she was engaged in the development of artificial intelligence of a new generation . The agency believes that the new AI will be many orders of magnitude smarter than its forerunner, and the robot will argue based on "common sense". Much more money was invested in this project than in a nuclear engine — not millions of dollars, but $ 2 billion. Valerie Browning, Director of DAPRA's Military Science Department, said: in a credible employee. "