NASA’s nuclear power plans face higher hurdles

By Leonard David

Senior space writer

updated 9:53 p.m. ET April 6, 2005

NASA’s Prometheus program to employ nuclear reactors in space is a work in progress — viewed as a key building block of the space agency’s vision for space exploration.

Shortly after the programmatic liftoff of Prometheus, NASA had its eyes on the Jupiter Icy Moon Mission, or JIMO. This premier outing pushed by electric-propulsion engines would study three ice-covered Galilean moons — Ganymede, Callisto and Europa — with JIMO relaying oodles of data about the moons’ origin and evolution, as well as scoping out any potential for faraway life.

But JIMO has now been deferred. With a launch date of 2015 and a mission design life of 20 years, the flagship mission was lowered to half mast.

Prometheus officials are now looking at other targets to showcase a space nuclear power system. Less demanding in terms of overall lifetime, this Prometheus mission would happen sooner, and likely journey to a closer-in target.

Still ahead, however, are daunting technical and safety challenges. Keeping the financial tap on full throttle to harness space nuclear power will also be taxing — an investment reality for Congress and the public.

Planet hopping
NASA's exploration initiative is a multimission, multidecade, human and robotic effort to explore the moon, Mars and beyond using a spiral development process to introduce important new technologies as they mature.

In this regard, space nuclear fission reactor systems could reset the way the reconnaissance of our solar system has been done over the decades. Prometheus planet-hopping is part of this "new age of exploration" that’s being promised.

The Prometheus Project is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. But a visit to JPL’s Web site on the work mirrors the still-to-be-determined nature of the high-profile endeavor.

What’s the mission and science for Prometheus? "Information coming soon," the Web site advises. That’s another way of saying that harnessing nuclear power for space voyaging has long been an elusive task.

Cycle of boom and bust
"If one stood on top of a pile of all the studies of space nuclear power that have been performed over the past 20 years, one would be several feet closer to Mars … at least during some hours of the day," explained Steven Aftergood, head of the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists in Washington.

Aftergood noted in a recent newsletter that, as a technology enterprise, space nuclear reactors have been "subject to a remarkable cycle of boom and bust over the past 50 years."

Start-stop work has dead-ended ambitious programs every decade or so, Aftergood said. He noted that the SP-100 program — an initiative that involved NASA, the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy — was killed 10 years ago after $400 million had been doled out.

Move up to today: "Proponents note that space reactors hold the promise of dramatic enhancements in the scope, lifetime and effectiveness of space exploration activities," Aftergood said.

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