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 ...

There have been full scale nuclear thermal rocket engines built and tested on the ground since the 1960s. The US had the NERVA project. The attraction is that the ISP would be up to triple the ISP of ...

A prototype ion engine that uses lithium vapor as a propellant has aced its first tests, achieving 25 times more power than ...

You might think the bloggers and YouTubers of the world have already found and profiled every neat or obscure project for a military aircraft that never left the drawing board. But every once in a ...

The fuel was subjected to full reactor heat and hydrogen gas and kept there for 20 minutes – about what a nuclear engine would have to endure during a boost maneuver. Other tests looked at how the ...

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: Humanity owes a debt of gratitude to the chemical rockets that have launched satellites, astronauts, and entire space stations into space. But if we ...

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 ...

NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced Tuesday a collaboration to demonstrate a nuclear thermal rocket engine in space, an enabling capability for NASA crewed ...

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 ...

BWX Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: BWXT) today announced that its reactor and fuel will be key components in the world’s first demonstration spacecraft using nuclear thermal propulsion. Working as part of ...

Humanity has lived in the space age for decades, but virtually every probe, rocket, and satellite shaping this era has relied on chemical propulsion. As scientists and engineers eye more distant ...