Russia Hopes To Fly Humans To Mars With Nuclear Spaceship

MOSCOW — Russia should build a new nuclear-powered spaceship for prospective manned missions to Mars and other planets, the nation's space chief said Thursday.

Anatoly Perminov first proposed building the ship at a government meeting Wednesday but didn't explain its purpose. President Dmitry Medvedev backed the project and urged the government to find the money.

In remarks posted Thursday on his agency's Web site, Perminov said the nuclear spaceship should be used for human flights to Mars and other planets. He said the project is challenging technologically, but could capitalize on the Soviet and Russian experience in the field.

Perminov said the preliminary design could be ready by 2012, and then it would take nine more years and cost 17 billion rubles (about $600 million, or euro400 million) to build the ship.

"The project is aimed at implementing large-scale space exploration programs, including a manned mission to Mars, interplanetary travel, the creation and operation of planetary outposts," Perminov's Web statement said.

The ambitious plans contrast with Russia's slow progress on building a replacement to its mainstay spacecraft – the Soyuz.

Russia is using Soyuz booster rockets and capsules, developed 40 years ago, to send crews to the International Space Station. The development of a replacement rocket and a prospective spaceship with a conventional propellant has dragged on with no end in sight.

Despite its continuing reliance on the old technology, Russia stands to take a greater role in space exploration in the coming years. NASA's plan to retire its shuttle fleet next year will force the United States and other nations to rely on the Russian spacecraft to ferry their astronauts to and from the International Space Station until NASA's new manned ship becomes available.

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Perminov said the new nuclear-powered ship should have a megawatt-class nuclear reactor, as opposed to small nuclear reactors that powered some Soviet military satellites. The Cold War-era Soviet spy satellites had reactors that produced just a few kilowatts of power and had a life span of about a year.

Igor Lisov, a Moscow-based expert on Russian space program, said the prospective ship would use a nuclear reactor to run an electric rocket engine.

"It will be quite efficient for flight to Mars," he told The Associated Press on Thursday.

Lisov said Soviet work on a nuclear-powered electric rocket engine dates back to the 1960s when Soviet engineers began developing plans for a manned flight to Mars.

He said Russia's experience in building nuclear-powered satellites would also help develop the new spaceship. "It will require a significantly more powerful nuclear reactor, but the task is quite realistic," Lisov said.

Stanley Borowski, a senior engineer at NASA specializing in nuclear rocket engines, said they have many advantages for deep space missions, such as to take astronauts and gear to Mars. In deep space, nuclear rockets are twice as fuel-efficient as conventional rockets, he said.

NASA has used small amounts of plutonium in deep space probes, including those to Jupiter, Saturn, Pluto and heading out of the solar system.

The only planetary mission currently considered by Russia is a plan to send a probe to one of Mars' twin moons, Phobos. It was set to launch this year, but was delayed.

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AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein contributed to this report.

Comments

[ziploked]

Wow! Thank you to all of you whose responses precede this! I learned far more from reading your thoughts and responses than from reading the article! Great stuff!

[jsarets]

As Mars paper studies go, nuclear-electric and nuclear-thermal propulsion is nothing new. I can point to extensive lists of nuclear-powered Mars mission plans developed by the US and the USSR that both date back to 1960 (the NASA Lewis study and the Korolev TMK-E study).

Thereafter, both superpowers developed extensive series of follow-on proposals. Post-Soviet Russia produced nuclear Mars proposals in 2000 (RKK Energia Marpost) and the 1994-1995 timeframe (using the nuclear-thermal Kosberg RD-0410 engine that was actually built and flown successfully).

As always, money and politics gets in the way of what is technically achievable.

[FrankenPC]

Electric engine? Where's the mass for propulsion?

[palindrom]

An astute question. Generally, some kind of gas is ionized (which is energetically expensive, by the way). Once the gas is ionized, it's possible to accelerate it to very high speed with an electric field. The ions are then ejected from the back of the spacecraft. The advantage of a scheme like this is the high exhaust velocity, which in turn means that each kilogram of exhaust carries a very large amount of momentum. But this scheme only works if the gas isn't at all dense, which means that the peak thrust is small. So you can't use this to, say, lift a spacecraft off against gravity -- but you can use it to gradually attain a high speed once you're out in space. NASA has experimented with this scheme, using power from solar panels to supply energy to ion engines that stay on for months and months, gradually pushing the spacecraft up to the speeds they want.

[FrankenPC]

Interesting. So a large payload of liquefied gas would last quite a while under heavy electromagnetic acceleration (E=MC^2). Assuming a megawatt of nuclear power is sufficient to do the task.

[FrankenPC]

AND as a side benny, the liquid gas could be used as coolant for the spacecraft! Yet another major issue with energy production in the vacuum of space.

[IDIOTA]

While I am excited by the possibility of travel throughout the solar system and beyond, I still would prefer a safer fuel source or method that does not involve nuclear waste.

Too bad we couldn't harness the power of, say, neutrinos which permeate the universe.

[palindrom]

Yeah, too bad ... but (a) they go right through almost everything and (b) there wouldn't be that much power available even if you could grab them. They're important -- without neutrinos we'd have no heavy elements, because they make it possible for neutrons to turn into protons and stabilize nuclei heavier than hydrogen, and a hydrogen universe would be very, very dull. But as a power source, they're a non-starter as you say.

Now photons -- sunlight! -- they're abundant and relatively easy to capture! But, if you get a long way from the sun, there isn't much light left -- hence the radioactive thermal generators that have powered the missions 'way out to Jupiter and beyond.

[AtheistUS]

Stable neutron with stable protons would do very well, and there could be heavier elements.

Of course this all is difficult to imagine because neutrinos are one of very few components from which the Standard Model is built - removing neutrinos would break almost all that we know about the Universe.

[lightningbolt]

The space program is an excellent way to put people to work. The technologies developed will help the rest of the economy grow and prosper. Competition from Russia is exactly what the U.S. needs to get its own space program back on track. It's kind of embarrassing that the U.S. will have to rely on Russia for a few years to get people into space.

[FerrisValyn]

I agree that space development is a great way to get people to work. But competition from Russia? That really won't make that much of a difference.

What is a much better idea is to develop new forms of economic growth, that depend on space, and there are many potential industries that could help grow the economy.

And the really great irony - growing these industries would likely get us access to space much sooner than Ares I ever could

[AtheistUS]

Competition between former USSR and US was good for progress of science and technology.

[SouthJerseySteve]

Nothing like a Space Race to jump-start the economy and new technologies! Tang, anyone?