Nuclear thermal propulsion ship
An illustration of a spacecraft for deep space missions powered by nuclear thermal propulsion. Congress has added funding to NASA appropriations bills to support development of the technology.

NASA has selected three teams of companies to perform concept studies of nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) reactors while making plans to fund similar studies for nuclear surface power systems.

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Jeff Foust has more than a decade of experience writing about space policy, entrepreneurial ventures and regulatory affairs. In 2001, he established spacetoday.net to aggregate and summarize the day's space-related news stories. In 2003, he started The...