Space Race Bad – China UQ

Space Race Bad – Russia

Other, more-fanciful nuclear propulsion ideas were proposed too. One, Project Orion, would have been powered by nuclear bombs. The physicist Freeman Dyson, who worked on the project, told the New York Times Magazine he saw it “as the solution to a problem. With one trip we’d have got rid of 2,000 bombs.” “Orion was a delightful scientific exercise, but not very feasible,” McDaniel said. These various technologies cost money to develop, of course, and the scale of the cash that flowed their way shows how seriously Americans took nuclear propulsion. Between 1955 and 1972, the United States spent more than $1.4 billion in then-year dollars on developing nuclear rockets and related technologies. At the end of that period, when the Nixon administration cut NASA’s budget generally and NERVA’s specifically, the United States was well on its way to developing nuclear power for spacefaring and space purposes. “It is indeed remarkable that the adoption of the Rover–NERVA database, upgraded and modernized by current rocket-engine technology, would fully satisfy NASA’s space-transfer propulsion and long-distance-exploration requirements and permit realization of a safe and low programmatic risk development programme,” wrote Stanley Gunn, who worked on the nuclear propulsion program for Rocketdyne, in a 2001 article for Space Policy. There were several attempts to resurrect nuclear propulsion of various types, most recently the mothballed Project Prometheus. None, though, have garnered much support. One major reason is that NASA picks its propulsion systems based on its targets—and true exploration of the solar system and beyond hasn’t really been a serious goal, though the Constellation plans for a return to the moon. “The destinations dictate the power system,” said Rao Surampudi, a Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer who works on the development of power systems. By and large, it’s cheaper and easier to go with solar power or very low-power radioisotope generators like the one that powers the Cassini mission. McDaniel agreed that the targets drive things, citing the general decline of pure technology-development research at NASA. “Until we commit to going back to Mars, we’re not going to have a nuclear rocket,” McDaniel said. Or perhaps a new nuclear-powered Russian spacecraft could get anxious minds at the Pentagon and NASA worrying about the need to keep pace with the Ivanovs. After all, the Soviet nuclear-rocket program may have been more advanced than the American efforts at the time of the USSR’s collapse.

Top officials in the Russian Federation announced on Thursday that they gave their acceptance to a proposal stating that the country should pursue the development of a nuclear-powered spacecraft, which is currently set to fly as early as 2012. This would essentially leave the former Communist nation in charge of the nuclear space race, as the United States continue to lose their role as the dominating force in space today. According to Russian scientists, building the new spacecraft could cost as much as $600 million, Wired reports. “The idea [of nuclear-powered spaceflight] has bright prospects, and if Russia could stage a breakthrough it could become our main contribution to any future international program of deep space exploration,” independent, Moscow-based space expert Andrei Ionin told the Christian Science Monitor newspaper. The Co-director of the University of New Mexico (UNM) Institute for Space and Nuclear Power Studies, nuclear engineer Patrick McDaniel, says that the idea is definitely feasible, but that there are numerous obstacles still to be tackled.