Re: 3 months to Mars

The original cost of going to the moon was around 20 billion dollars.  Adjusted for inflation this is over a hundred billion.  We need that money for things on Earth, or to put it more accurately, those resources can be put to better use.  These expenditures either come out of our pockets or put us further into debt.  Either way, it is financially bad for us.

On Sun, Oct 25, 2020 at 1:40 PM Larry Trout wrote:

New nuclear engine concept could help realize 3-month trips to Mars

Seattle-based Ultra Safe Nuclear Technologies (USNC-Tech) has developed a concept for a new Nuclear Thermal Propulsion (NTP) engine and delivered it to NASA. Claimed to be safer and more reliable than previous NTP designs and with far greater efficiency than a chemical rocket, the concept could help realize the goal of using nuclear propulsion to revolutionize deep space travel, reducing Earth-Mars travel time to just three months.

According to Dr. Michael Eades, principal engineer at USNC-Tech, the new concept engine is more reliable than previous NTP designs and can produce twice the specific impulse of a chemical rocket. Specific impulse is a measure of a rocket's efficiency.

To fuel the concept, UNSC-Tech uses a Fully Ceramic Micro-encapsulated (FCM) fuel to power the engine's reactor. This fuel is based on High-Assay Low Enriched Uranium (HALEU), which is derived from reprocessed civilian nuclear fuel and is enriched to between 5 and 20 percent – greater than that of civilian reactors and less than that of naval reactors. The fuel is then encapsulated into particles coated with zirconium carbide (ZrC).