Russia wants to use nuclear-powered spaceship to fly to Mars in 45 days, instead of seven months.
Rosatom, Russia’s national nuclear corporation, has the idea to use a nuclear-powered spaceship, that it’s not a new concept either. Russia and the United States were working on a systems during since the 1960s and their efforts were focused on lightweight orbital satellites.
The trip to the Red planet takes around seven months and depends on when it is taken. Mars and Earth’s orbits are not perfectly circular, so the time it takes to travel between them varies from six to eight months.
Rosatom is developing a megawatt-class nuclear engine for spacecraft:
A vehicle equipped with a nuclear engine is expected to have 30 times the power reserve of conventional spaceships. The designs we are developing will enable mankind to build spaceships that can address all the space challenges of the 21st century, such as cargo transport, removal of space debris, asteroid impact avoidance, etc. The nuclear engine is designed by the Dollezhal Research and Development Institute of Power Engineering in association with the Keldysh Research Centre. A prototype will be ready for flight testing in 2018.
via wired
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