Wall reports that a new type of nuclear reactor designed to power crewed outposts on the moon and Mars could be ready for its first in-space trial just a few years from now, project team members said. A flight test is the next big step for the Kilopower experimental fission reactor, which aced a series of critical ground tests from November 2017 through March 2018. No off-Earth demonstration is on the books yet, but Kilopower should be ready to go by 2022 or so if need be, said Patrick McClure, Kilopower project lead at the Department of Energy's (DOE) Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
"I think we could do this in three years and be ready for flight," McClure said late last month during a presentation with NASA's Future In-Space Operations working group. "I think three years is a very doable time frame," he added, stressing that this is his opinion, not necessarily that of NASA, which is developing the Kilopower project along with the DOE.
Related: See the Next Generation of Nuclear Power for Mars Missions (Video)
Nuclear energy has been powering spacecraft for decades. NASA's Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes, New Horizons spacecraft, and Curiosity Mars rover, along with many other robotic explorers, employ radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), which convert the heat thrown off by the radioactive decay of plutonium-238 into electricity. The power output from RTGs is relatively low. The one used by Curiosity and NASA's upcoming Mars 2020 rover, for example, generates about 110 watts of electricity at the start of a mission. (This output declines slowly over time.)
Crewed Mars or Moon outposts will have considerably higher energy demands than that: around 40 kilowatts of continuously available electrical power (40 kWe), even for the small research station NASA envisions setting up by the late 2030s, McClure said. After all, the pioneers will need electricity to purify their water, generate oxygen from the carbon-dioxide-dominated Martian atmosphere, charge up their rovers, heat their habitats and so on. Human exploration of Mars (and the Moon) will therefore demand a different energy-production strategy. And that's where Kilopower comes in. Like nuclear power plants designed to stay put on Earth, Kilopower is a fission reactor. It converts the heat generated by splitting atoms into electricity, via devices called Stirling engines. (Nuclear power plants, by contrast, generally use this heat to create turbine-turning steam.) In the ground-test series that wrapped up in March 2018, which was known as KRUSTY (Kilopower Reactor Using Stirling Technology), the reactor converted 30% of fission heat into electricity, McClure said. This efficiency dwarfs that of RTGs, which convert about 7% of available heat.
"This was an extremely successful test," McClure said.
The Kilopower project officially started in 2015, but its architects proved out the basic concept back in 2012, via an experiment called Demonstration Using Flattop Fissions (DUFF). And yes, "Simpsons" buffs, the Kilopower folks are your people: DUFF and KRUSTY are references to the iconic animated TV show. Project team member Dave Poston is a big fan, McClure said. (For the uninitiated, Duff is the beer favored by Homer Simpson, and degenerate, tax-dodging lout Krusty the Clown hosts a kids' TV show in the "Simpsons" universe.)
Related: NASA's Human Mars Mission Will Require Living Off the Land (more).
For more details of plans that have been in the works since 2010, see: Chapter 9: http://www.i2mconsultants.com/downloads/corp/Memoir101-T0fC2016.pdf
Managed & Built by I2M Consulting, LLC | © 2010-
