At about the same time as the SNAP 2 Development Reactor tests (1958), the USAF requested a study on a thermoelectric power conversion system, targeting a 0.3 kWe-1kWe power regime. This was the birth of what would eventually become the SNAP-10 reactor. This reactor would evolve in time to become the SNAP-10A reactor, the first nuclear reactor to go into orbit.
In the beginning, this design was superficially quite similar to the Romashka reactor that we’ll examine in the USSR part of this blog post, with plates of U-ZrH fuel, separated by beryllium plates for heat conduction, and surrounded by radial and axial beryllium reflectors. Purely conductively cooled internally, and radiatively cooled externally, this was later changed to a NaK forced convection cooling system for better thermal management (see below). The resulting design was later adapted to the SNAP-4 reactor, which was designed to be used for underwater military installations, rather than spaceflight. Outside these radial reflectors were thermoelectric power conversion systems, with a finned radiating casing being the only major component that was visible. The design looked, superficially at least, remarkably like the RTGs that would be used for the next several decades. However, the advantages to using even the low power conversion efficiency thermoelectric conversion system made this a far more powerful source of electricity than the RTGs that were available at the time (or even today) for space missions.
Within a short period, however, the design was changed dramatically, resulting in a design very similar to the core for the SNAP-2 reactor that was under development at the same time. Modifications were made to the SNAP-2 baseline, resulting in the reactor cores themselves becoming identical. This also led to the NaK cooling system being implemented on the SNAP-10A. Many of the test reactors for the SNAP-2 system were also used to develop the SNAP-10A. This is because the final design, while lower powered, by 20 kWe of electrical output, was largely different in the power conversion system, not the reactor structure. This reactor design was tested extensively, with the S2ER, S2DR, and SCA test series (4A, 4B, and 4C) reactors, as well as the SNAP-10 Ground Test Reactor (S10FS-1). The new design used a similar, but slightly smaller, conical radiator using NaK as the working fluid for the radiator.
This was a far lower power design than the SNAP-2, coming in at 30 kWt, but with the 1.6% power conversion ratio of the thermoelectric systems, its electrical power output was only 500 We. It also ran almost 100°C cooler (200 F), allowing for longer fuel element life, but less thermal gradient to work with, and therefore less theoretical maximum efficiency. This tradeoff was the best on offer, though, and the power conversion system’s lack of moving parts, and ease of being tested in a non-nuclear environment without extensive support equipment, made it more robust from an engineering point of view. The overall design life of the reactor, though, remained short: only about 1 year, and less than 1% fissile fuel burnup. It’s possible, and maybe even likely, that (barring spacecraft-associated failure) the reactor could have provided power for longer durations; however, the longer the reactor operates, the more the fuel swells, due to fission product buildup, and at some point this would cause the clad of the fuel to fail. Other challenges to reactor design, such as fission poison buildup, clad erosion, mechanical wear, and others would end the reactor’s operational life at some point, even if the fuel elements could still provide more power.
The SNAP-10A was not meant to power crewed facilities, since the power output was so low that multiple installations would be needed. This meant that, while all SNAP reactors were meant to be largely or wholly unmaintained by crew personnel, this reactor had no possibility of being maintained. The reliability requirements for the system were higher because of this, and the lack of moving parts in the power conversion system aided in this design requirement. The design was also designed to only have a brief (72 hour) time period where active reactivity control would be used, to mitigate any startup transients, and to establish steady-state operations, before the active control systems would be left in their final configuration, leaving the reactor entirely self-regulating. This placed additional burden on the reactor designers to have a very strong understanding of the behavior of the reactor, its long-term stability, and any effects that would occur during the year-long lifetime of the system.
At the end of the reactor’s life, it was designed to stay in orbit until the short-lived and radiotoxic portions of the reactor had gone through at least five product half-lives, reducing the radioactivity of the system to a very low level. At the end of this process, the reactor would re-enter the atmosphere, the reflectors and end reflector would be ejected, and the entire thing would burn up in the upper atmosphere. From there, winds would dilute any residual radioactivity to less than what was released by a single small nuclear test (which were still being conducted in Nevada at the time). While there’s nothing wrong with this approach from a health physics point of view, as we saw in the last post on the BES-5 reactors the Soviet Union was flying, there are major international political problems with this concept. The SNAPSHOT reactor continues to orbit the Earth (currently at an altitude of roughly 1300 km), and will do so for more than 2000 years, according to recent orbital models, so the only system of concern is not in danger of re-entry any time soon; but, at some point, the reactor will need to be moved into a graveyard orbit or collected and returned to Earth – a problem which currently has no solution.
The Runup to Flight: Vehicle Verification and Integration
1960 brought big plans for orbital testing of both the SNAP-2 and SNAP-10 reactors, under the program SNAPSHOT: Two SNAP-10 launches, and two SNAP-2 launches would be made. Lockheed Missiles System Division was chosen as the launch vehicle, systems integration, and launch operations contractor for the program; while Atomics International, working under the AEC, was responsible for the power plant.
The SNAP-10A reactor design was meant to be decommissioned by orbiting for long enough that the fission product inventory (the waste portion of the burned fuel elements, and the source of the vast majority of the radiation from the reactor post-fission) would naturally decay away, and then the reactor would be de-orbited, and burn up in the atmosphere. This was planned before the KOSMOS-954 accident, when the possibility of allowing a nuclear reactor to burn up in the atmosphere was not as anathema as it is today. This plan wouldn’t increase the amount of radioactivity that the public would receive to any appreciable degree; and, at the time, open-air testing of nuclear weapons was the norm, sending up thousands of kilograms of radioactive fallout per year. However, it was important that the fuel rods themselves would burn up high in the atmosphere, in order to dilute the fuel elements as much as possible, and this is something that needed to be tested.
Enter the SNAP Reactor Flight Demonstration Number 1 mission, or RFD-1. The concept of this test was to demonstrate that the planned disassembly and burnup process would occur as expected, and to inform the further design of the reactor if there were any unexpected effects of re-entry. Sandia National Labs took the lead on this part of the SNAPSHOT program. After looking at the budget available, the launch vehicles available, and the payloads, the team realized that orbiting a nuclear reactor mockup would be too expensive, and another solution needed to be found. This led to the mission design of RFD-1: a sounding rocket would be used, and the core geometry would be changed to account for the short flight time, compared to a real reentry, in order to get the data needed for the de-orbiting testing of the actual SNAP-10A reactor that would be flown.
So what does this mean? Ideally, the development of a mockup of the SNAP-10A reactor, with the only difference being that there wouldn’t be any highly enriched uranium in the fuel elements, as normally configured; instead depleted uranium would be used. It would be launched on the same launch vehicle that the SNAPSHOT mission would use (an Atlas-Agena D), be placed in the same orbit, and then be deorbited at the same angle and the same place as the actual reactor would be; maybe even in a slightly less favorable reentry angle to know how accurate the calculations were, and what the margin of error would be. However, an Atlas-Agena rocket isn’t a cheap piece of hardware, either to purchase, or to launch, and the project managers knew that they wouldn’t be able to afford that, so they went hunting for a more economical alternative.
This led the team to decide on a NASA Scout sounding rocket as the launch vehicle, launched from Wallops Island launch site (which still launches sounding rockets, as well as the Antares rocket, to this day, and is expanding to launch Vector Space and RocketLab orbital rockets as well in the coming years). Sounding rockets don’t reach orbital altitudes or velocities, but they get close, and so can be used effectively to test orbital components for systems that would eventually fly in orbit, but for much less money. The downside is that they’re far smaller, with less payload and less velocity than their larger, orbital cousins. This led to needing to compromise on the design of the dummy reactor in significant ways – but those ways couldn’t compromise the usefulness of the test.
Sandia Corporation (which runs Sandia National Laboratories to this day, although who runs Sandia Corp changes… it’s complicated) and Atomics International engineers got together to figure out what could be done with the Scout rocket and a dummy reactor to provide as useful an engineering validation as possible, while sticking within the payload requirements and flight profile of the relatively small, suborbital rocket that they could afford. Because the dummy reactor wouldn’t be going nearly as fast as it would during true re-entry, a steeper angle of attack when the test was returning to Earth was necessary to get the velocity high enough to get meaningful data.
The Scout rocket that was being used had much less payload capability than the Atlas rocket, so if there was a system that could be eliminated, it was removed to save weight. No NaK was flown on RFD-1, the power conversion system was left off, the NaK pump was simulated by an empty stainless steel box, and the reflector assembly was made out of aluminum instead of beryllium, both for weight and toxicity reasons (BeO is not something that you want to breathe!). The reactor core didn’t contain any dummy fuel elements, just a set of six stainless steel spacers to keep the grid plates at the appropriate separation. Because the angle of attack was steeper, the test would be shorter, meaning that there wouldn’t be time for the reactor’s reflectors to degrade enough to release the fuel elements. The fuel elements were the most important part of the test, however, since it needed to be demonstrated that they would completely burn up upon re-entry, so a compromise was found.
The fuel elements would be clustered on the outside of the dummy reactor core, and ejected early in the burnup test period. While the short time and high angle of attack meant that there wouldn’t be enough time to observe full burnup, the beginning of the process would be able to provide enough data to allow for accurate simulations of the process to be made. How to ensure that this data, which was the most important part of the test, would be able to be collected was another challenge, though, which forced even more compromises for RFT-1’s design. Testing equipment had to be mounted in such a way as to not change the aerodynamic profile of the dummy reactor core. Other minor changes were needed as well, but despite all of the differences between the RFD-1 and the actual SNAP-10A the thermodynamics and aerodynamics of the system were different in only very minor ways.
Testing support came from Wallops Island and NASA’s Bermuda tracking station, as well as three ships and five aircraft stationed near the impact site for radar observation. The ground stations would provide both radar and optical support for the RFD-1 mission, verifying reactor burnup, fuel element burnup, and other test objective data, while the aircraft and ships were primarily tasked with collecting telemetry data from on-board instruments, as well as providing additional radar data; although one NASA aircraft carried a spectrometer in order to analyze the visible radiation coming off the reentry vehicle as it disintegrated.
The test went largely as expected. Due to the steeper angle of attack, full fuel element burnup wasn’t possible, even with the early ejection of the simulated fuel rods, but the amount that they did disintegrate during the mission showed that the reactor’s fuel would be sufficiently distributed at a high enough altitude to prevent any radiological risk. The dummy core behaved mostly as expected, although there were some disagreements between the predicted behavior and the flight data, due to the fact that the re-entry vehicle was on such a steep angle of attack. However, the test was considered a success, and paved the way for SNAPSHOT to go forward.
The next task was to mount the SNAP-10A to the Agena spacecraft. Because the reactor was a very different power supply than was used at the time, special power conditioning units were needed to transfer power from the reactor to the spacecraft. This subsystem was mounted on the Agena itself, along with tracking and command functionality, control systems, and voltage regulation. While Atomics International worked to ensure the reactor would be as self-contained as possible, the reactor and spacecraft were fully integrated as a single system. Besides the reactor itself, the spacecraft carried a number of other experiments, including a suite of micrometeorite detectors and an experimental cesium contact thruster, which would operate from a battery system that would be recharged by electricity produced by the reactor.
In order to ensure the reactor would be able to be integrated to the spacecraft, a series of Flight System Prototypes (FSM-1, and -4; FSEM-2 and -3 were used for electrical system integration) were built. These were full scale, non-nuclear mockups that contained a heating unit to simulate the reactor core. Simulations were run using FSM-1 from launch to startup on orbit, with all testing occurring in a vacuum chamber. The final one of the series, FSM-4, was the only one that used NaK coolant in the system, which was used to verify that the thermal performance of the NaK system met with flight system requirements. FSEM-2 did not have a power system mockup, instead it used a mass mockup of the reactor, power conversion system, radiator, and other associated components. Testing with FSEM-2 showed that there were problems with the original electrical design of the spacecraft, which required a rebuild of the test-bed, and a modification of the flight system itself. Once complete, the renamed FSEM-2A underwent a series of shock, vibration, acceleration, temperature, and other tests (known as the “Shake and Bake” environmental tests), which it subsequently passed. The final mockup, FSEM-3, underwent extensive electrical systems testing at Lockheed’s Sunnyvale facility, using simulated mission events to test the compatibility of the spacecraft and the reactor. Additional electrical systems changes were implemented before the program proceeded, but by the middle of 1965, the electrical system and spacecraft integration tests were complete and the necessary changes were implemented into the flight vehicle design.
The last round of pre-flight testing was a test of a flight-configured SNAP-10A reactor under fission power. This nuclear ground test, S10F-3, was identical to the system that would fly on SNAPSHOT, save some small ground safety modifications, and was tested from January 22 1965 to March 15, 1966. It operated uninterrupted for over 10,000 hours, with the first 390 days being at a power output of 35 kWt, and (following AEC approval) an additional 25 days of testing at 44 kWt. This testing showed that, after one year of operation, the continuing problem of hydrogen redistribution caused the reactor’s outlet temperature to drop more than expected, and additional, relatively minor, uncertainties about reactor dynamics were seen as well. However, overall, the test was a success, and paved the way for the launch of the SNAPSHOT spacecraft in April 1965; and the continued testing of S10F-3 during the SNAPSHOT mission was able to verify that the thermal behavior of astronuclear power systems during ground test is essentially identical to orbiting systems, proving the ground test strategy that had been employed for the SNAP program.
SNAPSHOT: The First Nuclear Reactor in Space
In 1963 there was a change in the way the USAF was funding these programs. While they were solely under the direction of the AEC, the USAF still funded research into the power conversion systems, since they were still operationally useful; but that changed in 1963, with the removal of the 0.3 kWe to 1 kWe portion of the program. Budget cuts killed the Zr-H moderated core of the SNAP-2 reactor, although funding continued for the Hg vapor Rankine conversion system (which was being developed by TRW) until 1966. The SNAP-4 reactor, which had not even been run through criticality testing, was canceled, as was the planned flight test of the SNAP-10A, which had been funded under the USAF, because they no longer had an operational need for the power system with the cancellation of the 0.3-1 kWe power system program. The associated USAF program that would have used the power supply was well behind schedule and over budget, and was canceled at the same time.
The USAF attempted to get more funding, but was denied. All parties involved had a series of meetings to figure out what to do to save the program, but the needed funds weren’t forthcoming. All partners in the program worked together to try and have a reduced SNAPSHOT program go through, but funding shortfalls in the AEC (who received only $8.6 million of the $15 million they requested), as well as severe restrictions on the Air Force (who continued to fund Lockheed for the development and systems integration work through bureaucratic creativity), kept the program from moving forward. At the same time, it was realized that being able to deliver kilowatts or megawatts of electrical power, rather than the watts currently able to be produced, would make the reactor a much more attractive program for a potential customer (either the USAF or NASA).
Finally, in February of 1964 the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy was able to fund the AEC to the tune of $14.6 million to complete the SNAP-10A orbital test. This reactor design had already been extensively tested and modeled, and unlike the SNAP-2 and -8 designs, no complex, highly experimental, mechanical-failure-prone power conversion system was needed.
SNAPSHOT consisted of a SNAP-10A fission power system mounted to a modified Agena-D spacecraft, which by this time was an off-the-shelf, highly adaptable spacecraft used by the US Air Force for a variety of missions. An experimental cesium contact ion thruster (read more about these thrusters on the Gridded Ion Engine page) was installed on the spacecraft for in-flight testing. The mission was to validate the SNAP-10A architecture with on-orbit experience, proving the capability to operate for 9 days without active control, while providing 500 W (28.5 V DC) of electrical power. Additional requirements included the use of a SNAP-2 reactor core with minimal modification (to allow for the higher-output SNAP-2 system with its mercury vapor Rankine power conversion system to be validated as well, when the need for it arose), eliminating the need (while offering the option) for active control of the reactor once startup was achieved for one year (to prove autonomous operation capability); facilitating safe ground handling during spacecraft integration and launch; and, accommodating future growth potential in both available power and power-to-weight ratio.
While the threshold for mission success was set at 90 days, for Atomics International wanted to prove 1 year of capability for the system; so, in those 90 days, the goal was that the entire reactor system would be demonstrated to be capable of one year of operation (the SNAP-2 requirements). Atomics International imposed additional, more stringent, guidelines for the mission as well, specifying a number of design requirements, including self-containment of the power system outside the structure of the Agena, as much as possible; more stringent mass and center-of-gravity requirements for the system than specified by the US Air Force; meeting the military specifications for EM radiation exposure to the Agena; and others.
The flight was formally approved in March, and the launch occurred on April 3, 1965 on an Atlas-Agena D rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base. The launch went perfectly, and placed the SNAPSHOT spacecraft in a polar orbit, as planned. Sadly, the mission was not one that could be considered either routine or simple. One of the impedance probes failed before launch, and a part of the micrometeorite detector system failed before returning data. A number of other minor faults were detected as well, but perhaps the most troubling was that there were shorts and voltage irregularities coming from the ion thruster, due to high voltage failure modes, as well as excessive electromagnetic interference from the system, which reduced the telemetry data to an unintelligible mess. This was shut off until later in the flight, in order to focus on testing the reactor itself.
The reactor was given the startup order 3.5 hours into the flight, when the two gross adjustment control drums were fully inserted, and the two fine control drums began a stepwise reactivity insertion into the reactor. Within 6 hours, the reactor achieved on-orbit criticality, and the active control portion of the reactor test program began. For the next 154 hours, the control drums were operated with ground commands, to test reactor behavior. Due to the problems with the ion engine, the failure sensing and malfunction sensing systems were also switched off, because these could have been corrupted by the errant thruster. Following the first 200 hours of reactor operations, the reactor was set to autonomous operation at full power. Between 600 and 700 hours later, the voltage output of the reactor, as well as its temperature, began to drop; an effect that the S10-F3 test reactor had also demonstrated, due to hydrogen migration in the core.
On May 16, just over one month after being launched into orbit, contact was lost with the spacecraft for about 40 hours. Some time during this blackout, the reactor’s reflectors ejected from the core (although they remained attached to their actuator cables), shutting down the core. This spelled the end of reactor operations for the spacecraft, and when the emergency batteries died five days later all communication with the spacecraft was lost forever. Only 45 days had passed since the spacecraft’s launch, and information was received from the spacecraft for only 616 orbits.
What caused the failure? There are many possibilities, but when the telemetry from the spacecraft was read, it was obvious that something badly wrong had occurred. The only thing that can be said with complete confidence is that the error came from the Agena spacecraft rather than from the reactor. No indications had been received before the blackout that the reactor was about to scram itself (the reflector ejection was the emergency scram mechanism), and the problem wasn’t one that should have been able to occur without ground commands. However, with the telemetry data gained from the dwindling battery after the shutdown, some suppositions could be made. The most likely immediate cause of the reactor’s shutdown was traced to a possible spurious command from the high voltage command decoder, part of the Agena’s power conditioning and distribution system. This in turn was likely caused by one of two possible scenarios: either a piece of the voltage regulator failed, or it became overstressed because of either the unusual low-power vehicle loads or commanding the reactor to increase power output. Sadly, the cause of this system failure cascade was never directly determined, but all of the data received pointed to a high-voltage failure of some sort, rather than a low-voltage error (which could have also resulted in a reactor scram). Other possible causes of instrumentation or reactor failure, such as thermal or radiation environment, collision with another object, onboard explosion of the chemical propellants used on the Agena’s main engines, and previously noted flight anomalies – including the arcing and EM interference from the ion engine – were all eliminated as the cause of the error as well.
Despite the spacecraft’s mysterious early demise, SNAPSHOT provided many valuable lessons in space reactor design, qualification, ground handling, launch challenges, and many other aspects of handling an astronuclear power source for potential future missions: Suggestions for improved instrumentation design and performance characteristics; provision for a sunshade for the main radiator to eliminate the sun/shade efficiency difference that was observed during the mission; the use of a SNAP-2 type radiation shield to allow for off-the-shelf, non-radiation-hardened electronic components in order to save both money and weight on the spacecraft itself; and other minor changes were all suggested after the conclusion of the mission. Finally, the safety program developed for SNAPSHOT, including the SCA4 submersion criticality tests, the RFT-1 test, and the good agreement in reactor behavior between the on-orbit and ground test versions of the SNAP-10A showed that both the AEC and the customer of the SNAP-10A (be it the US Air Force or NASA) could have confidence that the program was ready to be used for whatever mission it was needed for.
Sadly, at the time of SNAPSHOT there simply wasn’t a mission that needed this system. 500 We isn’t much power, even though it was more power than was needed for many systems that were being used at the time. While improvements in the thermoelectric generators continued to come in (and would do so all the way to the present day, where thermoelectric systems are used for everything from RTGs on space missions to waste heat recapture in industrial facilities), the simple truth of the matter was that there was no mission that needed the SNAP-10A, so the program was largely shelved. Some follow-on paper studies would be conducted, but the lowest powered of the US astronuclear designs, and the first reactor to operate in Earth orbit, would be retired almost immediately after the SNAPSHOT mission.
SNAP-10 was always a lower-powered system, even with its growth to a kWe-class power supply. Because of this, it was always seen as a power supply for unmanned probes, mostly in low Earth orbit, but certainly it would also have been useful in interplanetary studies as well, which at this point were just appearing on the horizon as practical. Had the SNAPSHOT system worked as planned, the cesium thruster that had been on board the Agena spacecraft would have been an excellent propulsion source for an interplanetary mission. However, due to the long mission times and relatively fragile fuel of the original SNAP-10A, it is unlikely that these missions would have been initially successful, while the SNAP-10A/2 and SNAP-B systems, with their higher power output and lifetimes, would have been ideal for many interplanetary missions.
As we saw in the US-A program, one of the major advantages that a nuclear reactor offers over photovoltaic cells – which were just starting to be a practical technology at the time – is that they offer very little surface area, and therefore the atmospheric drag that all satellites experience due to the thin atmosphere in lower orbits is less of a concern. There are many cases where this lower altitude offers clear benefits, but the vast majority of them deal with image resolution: the lower you are, the more clear your imagery can be with the same sensors. For the Russians, the ability to get better imagery of US Navy movements in all weather conditions was of strategic importance, leading to the US-A program. For Americans, who had other means of surveillance (and an opponent’s far less capable blue-water navy to track), radar surveillance was not a major focus – although it should be noted that 500 We isn’t going to give you much, if any resolution, no matter what your altitude.
One area that SNAP-10A was considered for was for meteorological satellites. With a growing understanding of how weather could be monitored, and what types of data were available through orbital systems, the ability to take and transmit pictures from on-orbit using the first generations of digital cameras (which were just coming into existence, and not nearly good enough to interest the intelligence organizations at the time), along with transmitting the data back to Earth, would have allowed for the best weather tracking capability in the world at the time. By using a low orbit, these satellites would be able to make the most of the primitive equipment available at the time, and possibly (speculation on my part) have been able to gather rudimentary moisture content data as well.
However, while SNAP-10A was worked on for about a decade, for the entire program there was always the question of “what do you do with 500-1000 We?” Sure, it’s not an insignificant amount of power, even then, but… communications and propulsion, the two things that are the most immediately interesting for satellites with reliable power, both have a linear relationship between power level and capability: the more power, the more bandwidth, or delta-vee, you have available. Also, the -10A was only ever rated for one year of operations, although it was always suspected it could be limped along for longer, which precluded many other missions.
The later SNAP-10A/2 and -10B satellites, with their multi-kilowatt range and years-long lifespans, offered far more flexibility, but by this point many in the AEC, the US Air Force, NASA, and others were no longer very interested in the program; with newer, more capable, reactor designs being available (we’ll look at some of those in the next post). While the SNAP-10A was the only flight-qualified and -tested reactor design (and the errors on the mission were shown to not be the fault of the reactor, but the Agena spacecraft), it was destined to fade into obscurity.
References and Additional Reading
Overall Program
SNAP 10A reactor design summary 1963 https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/4476722
ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY SNAP lOA PROGRAM 1966
https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/4077974
PRODUCTION PROGRAM OPERATIONAL SNAP 10A UNITS 1961
https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/966278
FISCAL YEAR 1962-63 SNAP lOA PROGRAM PROPOSAL
https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/966135
SNAP-10A COMPONENT DEVELOPMENT SUMMARY. VOLUME III. SHIELD, GROUND TEST ASSEMBLY, AND MATERIALS APPLICATIONS 1965
https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/4659357
SNAP 10A FLIGHT VEHICLE NUCLEAR ENVIRONMENT AND RADIATION EFFECTS 1966 https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/4578504
MAGNETIC MOMENTS AND VEHICLE TORQUES IN THE SNAP lOA https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/4618056
Mission Proposals
SNAP lOA POWERED METEOROLOGICAL SATELLITE STUDY 1964
https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/4591600
Fuel Element Development and Analysis
SNAP 10A Environrnental Test Status February – March 1964
https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1241353
QUALIFICATION TESTING SNAP lOA FUEL ELEMENTS (INTERIM REPORT) 1964 https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/4476808
Nuclear Design and Analysis
THE SNAP 10 CRITICAL ASSEMBLIES 1960 https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/4697802
SNAP 10A prestartup and startup performance 1964
https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/4450469
SNAP-10A Nuclear Analysis, Dayes et al 1965 https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/4471077
Component Design, Development, and Analysis
SNAP 2 REACTOR PUMP DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM (RADIAL GAP PERMANENT-MAGNET PUMP), Sudar 1961 https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/4807236
Progress Reports
SNAP lOA REACTOR PROGRESS REPORT
OCTOBER 1963 – JANUARY 1964 https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/4474938
SNAP 10A NUCLEAR AUXILIARY POWER UNIT DEVELOPMENT
DECEMBER 1960-MARCH 1961 https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/4476893
APRIL-JUNE 1961 https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/4482771
OCTOBER – DECEMBER 1963 https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/4471128
SNAP AEROSPACE NUCLEAR SAFETY PROGRAM
APRIL-JUNE 1966 https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/4483430
Program Costs
Decommissioning and Safety
SNAP 10 FS-3 Reactor Performance Hawley et al 1966 https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/7315563
SNAPSHOT and the Flight Safety Program
SNAP-10A SNAPSHOTProgram Development, Atomics International 1962 https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/4194781
Reliability Improvement Program Planning Report for the SNAP-10A Reactor, Coombs et al 1961 https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/966760
ACCEPTANCE TEST FACILITY SAFEGUARDS REPORT 1963
https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/4647237
FINAL SNAPSHOT PERFORMANCE REPORT 1966
https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/4474823
SNAPSHOT Briefings given at Vandenberg Air Force Base Prior to Launch, Heine 1965 https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/4194779
Aerospace Safety, Re-entry, and EOL Procedures
SNAPSHOT NUCLEAR FLIGHT SAFETY PROGRAM 1961
https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/4648974
SNAPSHOT SAFETY PROGRAM PLAN 1962
https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/966134
SNAP lOA Power System Shipment Safeguard s Report 1963
https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/4201278
SNAP lOA Launch and Reentry Hazards Due to Steady-State Operation 1964
https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/4195957
ACCEPTANCE TEST FACILITY SAFEGUARDS REPORT 1963 https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/4647237
Ablation of Reactor Components
Analysis of test data on ablation of SNAP 2/10A fuel, aluminum, and stainless steel in an arc-heated wind tunnel, Arnold 1964 https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/6433961
Aerospace Safety Reentry Analytical and Experimental Program SNAP 2 and 10A Interim Report, Elliot 1963 https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/4657830
DISINTEGRATION AND DISPERSION OF THE SNAP 10A REACTOR UPON RETURN FROM SATELLITE ORBIT 1965 https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/4556138
THERMAL BEHAVIOR OF SNAP REACTOR FUEL ELEMENTS DURING ATMOSPHERIC REENTRY 1966 https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/4552606
SNAP REACTOR ABLATION – DISINTEGRATION •^EXPERIMENT (RADE) IN A HYPERTHERMAL WIND TUNNEL 1967 https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/4310285
Current Status
SNAPSHOT orbit, Heavens Above https://www.heavens-above.com/orbit.aspx?satid=1314