New nuclear rocket engine cuts Mars trip to 6 months

New nuclear rocket engine cuts Mars trip to 6 months

Researchers at Ohio State University say they’ve reached a new milestone in nuclear propulsion that could dramatically speed up human missions to Mars. The team is developing what they call a centrifugal nuclear thermal rocket, or CNTR, which uses liquid uranium to heat propellant directly. In recent tests the design achieved a projected specific impulse of 1,800 seconds — roughly double the efficiency of earlier nuclear engines and four times g…