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 needs to pursue “aggressive” development of space nuclear propulsion technologies if the agency wants to use them for human missions to Mars in the next two decades, a report by a National Academies committee concluded.

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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...