this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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190
The US government is taking a serious step toward space-based nuclear propulsion (arstechnica.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Four years from now, if all goes well, a nuclear-powered rocket engine will launch into space for the first time. The rocket itself will be conventional, but the payload boosted into orbit will be a different matter.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

The higher orbit should mitigate most of those issues. There's more space, so a dead craft is less of an issue. It takes long enough to reenter that most of the radioactivity will have decayed. The biggest issue would be a launch failure.