NTR Hot Fire Testing Part I: Rover and NERVA Testing

Hello, and welcome back to Beyond NERVA, where today we are looking at ground testing of nuclear rockets. This is the first of two posts on ground testing NTRs, focusing on the testing methods used during Project ROVER, including a look at the zero power testing and assembly tests carried out at Los Alamos Scientific […]

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. […]