Borowski sees NTR as being a "three-fer," offering three mission types for the price of a single engine.
"We can use it to fly missions to the moon, to Mars and to near-Earth asteroids -- all with the same vehicle," he said. The asteroid mission is touted as a parallel to Apollo 8's mission to orbit the moon -- it would demonstrate everything needed for a landing mission other than the lander itself. A one-year asteroid mission would involve a one-month stay and provide valuable samples and data that could be used in determining how to tackle an asteroid headed for Earth.
This won't be your father's NERVA though. Robert Sackheim, assistant director and chief engineer for space propulsion systems at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, said that NASA and its contractor teams are working to combine lessons from NERVA with a number of new technologies to fashion "a non-controversial program."
For starters, the engine won't be test-fired in the open as NERVA was at Jackass Flats, Nevada. The new NTR engine could fire into a hole in the ground and the exhaust products would be caught by diatomaceous earth. Or, at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory -- where the U.S. Navy tests new submarine reactors -- it could fire through a special filtration system that would trap fission products like xenon before the non-radioactive hydrogen exhaust is chemically burned.
Even before then, explained Sackheim, electrical heaters will stand-in for reactor fuel rods to test the "safe, affordable fission-engine" concept.
It also seems likely that Russia will participate in the program since they have experience with more than 30 space-reactor launches to the United States' one (other types of nuclear-power sources use the heat of radioactive decay to generate electricity). Russia also appears to have developed robust fuel rods that would be needed in the nuclear engine. Building on this, the University of Florida has been developing new fuel elements for NASA.
