NASA’s push for a new nuclear rocket engine is not just another upgrade to the hardware we strap to the bottom of spacecraft. It is an attempt to rewrite the basic rules of how far, how fast, and how ...

MIT master’s student Taylor Hampson is advancing research into nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP), thanks ...

The USA's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has finalised an agreement with Lockheed Martin to begin work on the fabrication and design of an experimental nuclear thermal rocket and its engine ...

Mars has always felt like a distant neighbor, reachable only after a long, risky cruise through deep space. Now engineers ...

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 ...

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 ...

DARPA and NASA were working together on DRACO, a demonstration of nuclear thermal propulsion. Credit: NASA Experts from NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will hold a media ...

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Viewed from orbit, Jackass Flats — situated in southern Nevada about 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas — could easily be confused for Mars. The alluvial basin is full of tan and gray regolith, hued ...

The best, in fact, the only, candidate for this is the Nuclear Thermal Propulsion (NTP) system or nuclear rocket. First conceived of in 1945, this is a rocket that replaces burning chemical fuel with ...

The Space Age framed nuclear propulsion as a quiet rethinking of movement, distance, and endurance beyond Earth.

The rise of the commercial space industry precipitated a steeper decline at Rocketdyne. Boeing sold the Rocketdyne division to Pratt & Whitney in 2005 for $700 million, or approximately $1.2 billion ...