- NASA and the European Space Agency, as well as other space agencies, have been studying Mars for a long time with both rovers and orbiters.
- Cruel missions to the Red Planet are going to happen eventually, but the technology for such a mission is not yet there.
- An out-of-Seattle company is working on nuclear technology that could be used to carry out missions from Earth to Mars (and back again) much faster than ever before.
Mars has long been the subject of research by scientists here on Earth, and over the years space agencies such as NASA and ESA have developed orbiters and rovers that have given us a detailed view of what the Red Planet on offer. Cruel missions with a team of astronauts ready to explore Mars are a dream, but they are a dream that could come true sooner rather than later.
NASA has suggested that crew missions to Mars could be possible by the 2030s, but one of the biggest obstacles to scaling up is the long flight time. Rover missions to Mars take over six months, even when our planet is in a perfect position to launch missions, but crew missions are expected to take even longer. That is if we cannot find a way to make spacecraft move faster.
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Mar CNN reports, a company called Ultra Safe Nuclear Technologies is at an early conceptual stage of a new project that could bring a nuclear power rocket to fruition. Using nuclear thermal transfer, a spacecraft could make its way to Mars in a fraction of the time it would take with a conventional rocket firing fuel. According to the report, the trip could be shortened from around nine months to as little as three months.
Many of the benefits of travel time are faster. For starters, the amount of supplies the crew had to take with them could be greatly reduced, allowing the spacecraft to travel more lightly. Moreover, the idea of sticking astronauts in the confined spaces in a crew capsule for the best part of a year could lead to unwanted pressure, not to mention that space travelers would need more space to stretch their legs the longer they are copied up. A shorter trip could allow the crew capsule design to be a little simpler.
Even better, the shortest trip would mean the team would be exposed to radiation from space for a shorter time. That’s important because while the team could protect themselves from radiation with natural or artificial structures while on the surface of Mars, they would be somewhat exposed on the voyage there.
Again, we are at the earliest possible stages of such technology coming to fruition, so never expect to hear of real-life nuclear rockets hitting the control center at any time. soon, but it is an interesting thing to think about.
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Mike Wehner has been reporting on technology and video games for the past decade, covering breaking news and trends in VR, wearables, smartphones, and the future of tech. Mike was most recently a Tech Editor at The Daily Dot, and has appeared in USA Today, Time.com, and in countless web and print outlets. His love of narrating only second place on his game thesis.