A new report from two MIT researchers attempts to dig into the specifics of a shadowy Russian weapons program they call ...

I’ve grown up with rockets that burn chemical fuel, but NASA’s next big leap in propulsion could make those engines look as dated as steam trains. By turning to nuclear power in space, the agency is ...

Jim Bickford is leading the Thin Film Isotope Nuclear Engine Rocket (TFINER) project to develop a system for propelling a craft through space faster and farther than ever before. This technology has ...

There have been full scale nuclear thermal rocket engines built and tested on the ground since the 1960s. The US had the NERVA project. The attraction is that the ISP would be up to triple the ISP of ...

MIT researchers think they've worked out exactly how Russia's Burevestnik nuclear-powered missile flies. "It's almost ...

Space rockets may soon use nuclear-powered engines based on nuclear thermal propulsion, or NTP technology. While no nuclear engine will fly this year, the field is approaching a major milestone, with ...

The fuel was subjected to full reactor heat and hydrogen gas and kept there for 20 minutes – about what a nuclear engine would have to endure during a boost maneuver. Other tests looked at how the ...

New details of the Trump administration’s plans for NASA, released Friday, revealed the White House’s desire to end the development of an experimental nuclear thermal rocket engine that could have ...

You might think the bloggers and YouTubers of the world have already found and profiled every neat or obscure project for a military aircraft that never left the drawing board. But every once in a ...

NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced Tuesday a collaboration to demonstrate a nuclear thermal rocket engine in space, an enabling capability for NASA crewed ...

In the coming years, NASA plans to send several astrobiology missions to Venus and Mars to search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. These will occur alongside crewed missions to the moon (for the ...

Humanity has lived in the space age for decades, but virtually every probe, rocket, and satellite shaping this era has relied on chemical propulsion. As scientists and engineers eye more distant ...