NTR Hot Fire Testing 2: Modern Designs, New Plans for the LEU NTP
Hello, and welcome back to Beyond NERVA in the second part of our two-part series on ground testing NTRs. In part one, we examined the testing done at the National Defense Research Site in Nevada as part of Project Rover, and also a little bit of the zero power testing that was done at the […]
LEU NTP Part Three: Spacecraft Overview
Hello, and welcome to the Beyond NERVA blog! Today, we continue our in-depth look of NASA’s new nuclear thermal rocket. We briefly looked at the history of NTP (as NASA calls it, “nuclear thermal propulsion”) in part one, and in part two we took a deep dive into the materials that NASA is investigating for […]
LEU NTP Part Two: CERMET Fuel – NASA’s Path to Nuclear Thermal Propulsion
Hello, and welcome back to Beyond NERVA, for our second installment of our blog series on NASA’s new nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) system. In the last post, we looked briefly at nuclear thermal rockets (NTRs) in general, and NERVA’s XE-Prime engine, the only time a flight configuration NTR has ever been tested in the US. […]