NASA Is FINALLY Building A Nuclear Engine

in 1942 the United States military was testing a top-secret plane at the murak dry lake bed in California the current site of Edwards Air Force Base the plane was called the p-59 and it was the first U.S jet engine plane the secrecy around this thing was insane almost the same level as the Manhattan Project in fact whenever they moved the plane around the base they put a fake propeller on the front because all planes before this were prop planes in a plane with no propeller would obviously get people's attention but of course they couldn't disguise it when it was in the air so test pilot Jack Williams decided to take things to a bit more advanced level what it did was they went to a costume shop in La and he bought a gorilla suit a derby hat and a big fake cigar and he would wear this while he was out flying the plane and he did this so that later on when the other Pilots told people what they saw nobody would believe them in fact when they told people about it they would get sent to the base psychologist and the base psychologists were in on it and they used it to convince them they were crazy okay so you're telling me that you saw a plane with no propeller being flown by a gorilla wearing a hat you can hear yourself right now yes they basically just gas lit an entire base full of Pilots to convince them that they didn't see what they actually saw it's kind of a brilliant bit of psychology when you think about it and they did this for good reason jet engines would go on to totally change military aviation in the 40s and 50s and then passenger aviation in the 50s and 60s it's kind of hard to overstate just how much jet engines Change the World Air Travel literally quadrupled in the 10 years after the first passenger desk left the runways for the first time ever the average person could fly over the air so jet engines were faster to their destination obviously but it was really the economics of jet engines that made them win out jet engines ran much smoother than the Piston engines the drove prop planes so they lasted longer and needed less maintenance also ran on cheaper fuel than prop planes jet engines are the technological leap that changed everything for air travel and right now we might be seeing the same thing happening for space travel so we gotta talk about this [Music] back in January this year NASA the National Aeronautics and Space Administration announced they were teaming up with DARPA the defense Advanced research projects Agency on a program called Draco which stands for demonstration rocket for agile CIS lunar operations yeah there's gonna be some acronyms up in here NASA administrator Bill Nelson summed up the program like this quote NASA will work with her long-term partner DARPA to develop and demonstrate Advanced nuclear thermal propulsion technology as soon as 2027. with the help of this new technology astronauts could journey to and from deep space faster than ever a major capability to prepare for crude missions to Mars the part of that announcement that makes space nerds all tingly is the nuclear thermal propulsion part of it so yes finally at long last NASA is building a nuclear rocket and the timeline is ambitious completely ridiculous because not only are they wanting to get an entirely new type of engine up and flying in five years Draco will include a rocket a spacecraft and a launch vehicle all by the end of September 2027. good luck with that a spacecraft has a name and of course it's an acronym the experimental nuclear thermal rocket vehicle or x-interv swinging a mess on that one and these nuclear engines will be powered by a type of fuel called high assay low enriched uranium or Hali Haley hello hello never know how to pronounce that the low enriched uranium part isn't anything special that's what most nuclear power plants use it's the high assay part that sets it apart assay is basically the concentration of fissile isotope so higher assay means more bang for the book so Helio fuel has an assay between five and twenty percent of fuel Mass um that's much lower than say the ninety percent plus used in nuclear weapons but it's higher than the assay of uranium used in power plants I actually talked about heliu in a previous video about uses for nuclear waste there are some experimental reactors out there that can make this at a nuclear waste and then use that to make energy with it okay so why is this such a big deal why is this such a step up from the chemical rockets that we use now so for one thing it doesn't require an oxidizer like chemical Rockets do okay so stepping back just in case there's any like total rocket noobs out there so uh Rocket Fuel needs oxygen to burn just like everything on Earth the problem is that Rockets leave Earth that's kind of the point so Rockets have to bring their oxygen with them in the form of liquid oxygen so like big rocket tanks like the SLS when you look at that that's actually only half fuel the other half is oxidizer this not only adds a lot of weight it also cuts down on the amount of time that the Rockets can burn because you're literally emptying two tanks at once but a nuclear rocket doesn't need oxidizer because it's not actually burning the fuel it's just kind of using that nuclear fission to superheat it and expand it which flings it out the back and gives it thrust and without all that oxidizer those nuclear Rockets save a ton of weight actually many tons of weight most nuclear rocket designs use hydrogen as a field of choice because of its low atomic weight there are some downsides to this though because yeah nuclear Rockets save Mass on oxidizer but past designs have needed at least three times the amount of hydrogen to create the same thrust it's too early to say that that's the case with Draco though but to get back into the plus column nuclear Rockets have a very high specific impulse which means they are super efficient specific impulse measures how efficiently an engine converts fuel to thrust this is often measured in seconds as in how many seconds it can create thrust and Earth gravity and according to an article from the U.S office of nuclear energy in December 2021 the initial Target for a nuclear-powered rocket would be twice as efficient as chemical Rockets chemical Rockets having roughly 450 seconds of specific impulse meaning the nuclear rocket whenever around 900 seconds so for example the space shuttle had a specific impulse of just over 450 seconds which is about seven and a half minutes an engine powered by nuclear rocket would be more like 15 minutes and the longer you accelerate the faster you can go that's kind of the idea behind ion drives and just like ion drives uh we won't actually be seeing these being used to get off the ground they're just for once we're in space you can kind of you kind of think of these as ion drives on steroids But ultimately what all that means is that it means we can go super fast across vast distance is there's a reason why they're starting to take this more seriously at the same time that we're making plans to send people to Mars so for example a one-way trip to Mars using modern chemical Rockets takes about seven months a nuclear rocket would make it about 100 days and at least one new design from NASA could do even better again just just weeks before the Draco announcement and engine design by Ryan Goss at the University of Florida claimed to get specific impulses as high as 4 000 seconds with very little added Mass that's more spacecraft powered by goss's engine could reach Mars and are you ready for this 45 days that's less so getting to Mars faster it's not like trying to beat your best time to visit your cousin out in West Texas okay reducing flight time is everything when it comes to Mars every single day that an astronaut is spinning on the trip to Mars is another day of being exposed to higher than normal radiation levels and cosmic rays it's yet another day that they're losing muscle and bone density not to mention it's an extra day of food and Provisions for everyone on board all of which takes up space and adds weight just for perspective the longest consecutive period any human being has been in space is about 14 months that would be an average round trip to Mars so yeah faster is better for like a million different reasons so this might be the point in the video when you say look if nuclear Rockets are so great why aren't they already in flight it's a good good point actually good for you good for you thinking that there is actually quite a history to these back in the 1950s the United States began working on a project called nerva which stands for nuclear engine for Rocket vehicle application and that kids is how you acronym the military had actually been working on Atomic propelled spacecraft at the time because of course they were the whole world was trying to go Atomic at that time it was the atomic age but they gave up on those planes because of concerns of the the radiation of course so they moved on to nuclear rockets in the late 50s and early 60s several fission reactors for nerva were built and tested and they got really close to flying but it never quite happened I did a video a while back about NASA's original post Apollo plans drawn up by the space task group The Richard Nixon had created which by the way if you haven't seen that it's definitely worth a watch it blew my mind some of the plans that they drew up for the 70s and 80s were just kind of Bonkers in hindsight but a lot of it actually relied on this nerva engine yeah they had plans for nuclear spaceships that would carry people in Cargo in between all the different various space stations around the moon and around earth and the moon bases and stuff like that all of them powered by nuclear engines also fans of the Apple TV series For All Mankind might know that the nerva engine was actually what they put on their version of the Space Shuttle which they call Pathfinder but anyway in 73 when Nixon was President the Apollo program was winding down and uh yeah a lot of programs got cut and nerva was one of those programs and in a bit of a double whammy the Soviets were actually working on their own nuclear rocket at the time and when they saw that the Americans cut their program they kind of just you know let their slide as well it really was just a big pissing contest but probably the biggest thing holding back nuclear propulsion is the Environmental question I mean it makes sense we are after all putting nuclear reactors on top of massive controlled explosions now to be fair the nerva program actually had an incredibly good safety record and space programs have been launching nuclear materials since 1961 usually in the form of radioisotope thermoelectric generators or rtgs these provide Power for satellites and space probes especially if they're going really far into deep space where solar energy is harder to come by between 1961 and 2006 the U.S successfully flew 41 rtgs to space those include the New Horizon spacecraft in 2006 the Curiosity Rover in 2011 and the 2020 with perseverance they haven't all gone perfectly though for example in 1964 a U.S launch failed resulting in a small amount of plutonium-238 being released into the atmosphere plutonium-238 isn't great for humans especially the skeletons and livers which according to Wikipedia are important a large section of Russia was showered with polonium in 1969 and in 1978 the loss of the ussr's cosmos 954 satellite caused uranium to fall down on a 600 kilometer swath of Canadian soil the Canadian government charged Russia with six million dollars for the cleanup they eventually collected about half that much the point is we've actually been launching nuclear material for a long time yes there have been a few issues but nothing bad enough to ban them also rocket safeties come a long way since the 60s and 70s let's be honest so I for the record am excited about this I I really think that if we're gonna get serious about going to Mars we're going to get serious about going you know beyond as NASA keeps saying with Artemis program then we're gonna have to get serious about nuclear propulsion but if we really want to go beyond there's something Beyond nuclear thermal propulsion and that is nuclear pulsed propulsion sounds similar very different nuclear pulse propulsion is basically pushing a spacecraft forward by setting off nuclear explosions over and over and over again yeah that that's the pulse so the shock wave from this explosion impacts a pusher plate and then the spacecraft moves now as you can imagine you can get some pretty high specific impulse and speed from straight up nuclear bombs going off behind you how high well the US actually develops something like this they called it project Orion and it was expected to achieve six thousand seconds on the low end to a hundred thousand seconds on the high end 450. even more bad guano crazy was Project Daedalus which was proposed by the British interplanetary Society it proposed speeds equal to half the speed of light but big caveat here it would require fusion power so yeah it was it was a bit more of a thought experiment just to be fair though if we ever were to get serious about Interstellar travel we would need exactly something like that the only problem with project Orion is that in pulse propulsion in general is that if we were to ever try to really uh explore that we would have to actually reevaluate our International nuclear treaties yeah the partial nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 was one reason why project Orion was abandoned um kind of hard to test out that rocket without setting off some nuclear explosions but hey Draco seems to be a great first step um and I do think their timelines are a bit ambitious but I'm I'm excited I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with I want to see something like the Pathfinder from For All Mankind I do that that was badass all right so hang tight because in just a minute I'm going to give the update on the winners of the sketch round from last week uh some exciting stuff there but real quick let me shout out some new channel members we've got Laura Sosa Gator livius vicarious traveler Joe grossel Carter wolf Christopher Thomas Jeff Bryant Riley family friendly fun Michael W Miller will Frank and Jason K thanks to you guys so much these are channel members these are people who are contributing some amount of money to help keep the channel going which I do appreciate and in return they get perks like exclusive live streams early access to the videos and all kinds of other cool stuff you can see them in the in the comments down below with the little things next to their face if you would like to be one of them just hit the little join button right down below all right so last week we launched sketch Madness and now it's time to look at the results of round one so here's today's sketch Madness update [Music] okay I decided I would do a blind reaction to the results so I haven't seen these yet so here's the full brackets here's what you guys voted on first matchup was the five worst Cults of all time versus how crew Dragon will help open up space the winner was five worst Cults of all time with 61 of the vote that was closer than I thought it'd be honestly all right next match up between these two yep penis designer okay this is about what I expected but anyway 71 versus 29 on that one next up drum roll please the winner is of course 66 to 34 again kind of surprised that one was so close next match up this was the 1 million um subscriber celebration video I know which one's gonna win this one we all know which one's gonna win this one hey look at that what how is it that close this is the biggest surprise so far for me wow okay so 52 to 48 but the one that won is the one that I thought would win next match up I think I know which one this is going to be also very close okay wow I really thought that one would be a blow it out of the water okay well let's keep going the Venus one was fun we had some cool like makeup effects and stuff but I think the science of addiction One's Gonna Win and the winner is what okay well I'm out I wouldn't have gotten that I really thought that the other one would have gotten better let's go on to the next one um I'm pretty sure I know which one this one's gonna be the first one I actually got uh Andy Weir involved I think I know which one's gonna win this one and the winner is oh my God what an upset there's been some upsets here okay 53-47 that was the winner all right last one uh hydrogen fuel cell versus the golden ratio the hydrogen fuel cell when I actually that one has Zoe in it I think that's going to be the winner here let's see I probably did worse than everybody at this wow wow this is like this is this is surprising me these results have really surprised me okay all right so this is for round two this is what we're gonna be voting on right now round two is now live as I speak on uh on the website that is that Joe scott.com Madness go there to vote for these you got the worst Cult of all time versus the top five weirdest reproductive organs in nature could we clone ourselves versus the second clone so these are the two clone videos going up against each other that's going to be interesting um the deadliest strip of land in the world versus vanishes to be a lot more like Earth and the weird phenomenon that proves all pain is in the mind about Phantom Pain basically and uh the golden ratio up against each other so you guys have really surprised me this really uh there were some upsets here for me honestly so go there to that Joe scott.com madness vote for this next round and you're gonna surprise me again I feel like all right make sure and check out the merch while you're there because each intro does have a corresponding piece of merch like this Peter Johnson penis designer ID badge that has my actual face on it which will in no way haunt me till the end of my days plenty of prizes on the line so vote well and Godspeed I'll uh pin the link in the comments but it's that Joe scott.com Madness good luck

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 940,179

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott

Id: K5UU0GA5GAU

Length: 17min 36sec (1056 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 10 2023