NASA’s push for a new nuclear rocket engine is not just another upgrade to the hardware we strap to the bottom of spacecraft. It is an attempt to rewrite the basic rules of how far, how fast, and how ...

New details of the Trump administration’s plans for NASA, released Friday, revealed the White House’s desire to end the development of an experimental nuclear thermal rocket engine that could have ...

Viewed from orbit, Jackass Flats — situated in southern Nevada about 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas — could easily be confused for Mars. The alluvial basin is full of tan and gray regolith, hued ...

Jim Bickford is leading the Thin Film Isotope Nuclear Engine Rocket (TFINER) project to develop a system for propelling a craft through space faster and farther than ever before. This technology has ...

How can fission-powered propulsion help advance deep space exploration, specifically to the outer planets like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th ...

Nuclear propulsion and power technologies could unlock new frontiers in missions to the moon, Mars, and beyond. NASA has reached an important milestone advancing nuclear propulsion that could benefit ...

A new report from two MIT researchers attempts to dig into the specifics of a shadowy Russian weapons program they call ...

Denis Kutovoy, deputy director of the corporation’s space systems department, made this announcement at the Russian Space Forum MOSCOW, April 9. /TASS/. Russia’s Roscosmos, together with the Kurchatov ...

Nasa is developing ways to use nuclear power to send spacecraft to their destinations. Nuclear propulsion could greatly reduce the journey time to Mars, perhaps cutting a voyage of more than six ...

While NASA, along with its international and commercial partners, is going pedal to the metal back to the moon, the space agency is not neglecting Mars. In 2028, if all goes well, NASA plans to test a ...

An illustration of one of the twin Voyager spacecraft, which rely on radioisotope thermoelectric generators to convert heat into electricity, in interstellar space. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech When ...

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 ...