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.

With congressional funding and industry support, nuclear thermal propulsion technology is making progress for potential use on future NASA deep space missions, although how it fits into the agency’s exploration architectures remains uncertain.

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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...