Crews at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, install a flight reactor engineering development unit into Test Stand 400 in preparation for cold-flow testing. The test campaign began in July and ran through September and marked the first testing on a flight reactor engineering development unit since the 1960s. Credit: NASA/Adam Butt
Host Andres Almeida: Nuclear propulsion engineering could play a key role in sending spacecraft to deep space, enabling faster and farther journeys for robots and humans. How does it work? How safe is it? And how have we applied lessons from the past to shape the future of exploration?
Kurt Polzin, chief engineer for the Space Nuclear Propulsion Office at Marshall Space Flight Center, is here to tell us. This is Small Steps, Giant Leaps.
[Intro music]
Welcome to Small Steps, Giant Leaps, the podcast from NASA’s Academy of Program/Project and Engineering Leadership, or APPEL. I’m your host Andres Almeida.
This is an exciting topic, so let’s get into it.
Host: Hi, Kurt, welcome.
Kurt Polzin: Thank you.
Host: What is space nuclear propulsion and why is NASA investing in it?
Kolzin: Sure. In nuclear energy for propulsion, and even for power, there’s nothing magical about it. A lot of people think nuclear and they think this big kind of, kind of very “black box,” you know, very hard to understand concept.
But really, nuclear power, it’s just a source of heat. It’s a very big source of heat. It’s a very high-density source of heat.
You know, in our project, when we talk space, nuclear propulsion and power, we’re normally talking about fission systems. So, taking uranium atoms and breaking them apart into their, you know, constituent atoms through that process, as opposed to radioisotope, where you take, say, plutonium and it falls apart over time.
Fission is really critical because it’s scalable. It’s high-power density, it’s scalable, and it provides us with a couple of really key things that are really important for working in space.
One: Very high power on demand. I can get high power, I can get it quickly. And the second is power where other power sources may not be useful or may not be big enough.
So, for example, in the shadows, like on the Moon when it’s in shadow or when you’re very far from the Sun, these are areas where nuclear really shines.
And it’s why NASA is investing in …
