Coverage in OilPrice.com of the Trump Administration’s Space Policy Directive 6 of Dec. 14 (already reported in the Briefing) makes clear that NASA has set goals well within this decade for demonstrations of both nuclear fission for rocket propulsion, and nuclear power sources for lunar exploration and settlement. These NASA programs, if not sabotaged in Congress or by another administration, will pace the development of advanced fission reactors and even fusion demonstration reactors for economic development on Earth.
“NASA’s near-term priority will be to mature and demonstrate a fission surface power system on the Moon in the late 2020s, in collaboration with the Department of Energy and industry,” the website reports. Space Policy Directive 6 itself sets the objective to ““demonstrate a fission power system on the surface of the Moon that is scalable to a power range of 40 kilowatt-electric (kWe) and higher to support a sustained lunar presence and exploration of Mars.” Earlier, in November, “Department of Energy said that NASA plans to build … a nuclear power plant on the Moon by 2026…. The plan will involve the construction of a 10-kW class fission surface power system to be used for demonstrative purposes. The plant is to be manufactured and assembled on Earth and then shipped to the Moon on a launch vehicle. This vehicle will take the plant to Moon orbit, from where a lander will take it to the surface of the satellite. The demonstration will continue for one year, and if successful, it could open the door to other missions on both the Moon and Mars.”
As for nuclear thermal propulsion “NTP offers virtually unlimited energy density and specific impulse roughly double that of the highest-performing traditional chemical systems, according to NASA.” The Agency’s priority will be to demonstrate space nuclear power propulsion (SNPP) of a rocket by the second half of the decade.
The critical third element embraced by the Directive is to “develop uranium fuel processing capabilities that enable fuel production that is suitable to lunar and planetary surfaces and in-space power, nuclear electric propulsion (NEP), and nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) applications.”
OilPrice.com reports that the Directive motivated these crash efforts, in part, as necessary to win a “space race” with China, an indication of the respect with which NASA views the rapid progress of the Chinese space program.
