NASA and the U.S. military plan to launch a nuclear-powered spacecraft to Earth orbit in late 2025 or early 2026. The project, known as DRACO ("Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations"), ...

Engineers say a nuclear thermal rocket could cut astronauts' travel time to Mars from nine months to two. Credit: NASA NASA and the U.S. military plan to test a nuclear-powered rocket engine in space ...

NASA plans to send crewed missions to Mars over the next decade – but the 140 million-mile (225 million-kilometer) journey to the red planet could take several months to years round trip. This ...

Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster thriller Oppenheimer has rekindled public interest in everything nuclear, including nuclear thermal propulsion in space, a promising yet unproven technology that could ...

Artist impression of a nuclear fission powered rocket. Credit: General Atomics A new test of nuclear propellant fuel under space-like conditions has been hailed as a success by NASA and General ...

Every year, companies and space agencies launch hundreds of rockets into space—and that number is set to grow dramatically ...

I’ve grown up with rockets that burn chemical fuel, but NASA’s next big leap in propulsion could make those engines look as dated as steam trains. By turning to nuclear power in space, the agency is ...

There have been full scale nuclear thermal rocket engines built and tested on the ground since the 1960s. The US had the NERVA project. The attraction is that the ISP would be up to triple the ISP of ...

In SYFY’s upcoming deep space science fiction series The Ark, humanity’s last hope of survival is aboard the interstellar starship the Ark One, on their way to a new star system. When something goes ...

(CNN) — A nuclear thermal rocket engine in development could one day transport humans to Mars. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a research arm of the US Department of Defense, and NASA ...

Humanity has lived in the space age for decades, but virtually every probe, rocket, and satellite shaping this era has relied on chemical propulsion. As scientists and engineers eye more distant ...

NASA and DARPA have chosen aerospace and defense company Lockheed Martin to develop a spacecraft with a nuclear thermal rocket engine. Announced in January, the initiative — in which BWX Technologies ...