The Rosatom State Corporation plans to complete the creation of a prototype megawatt-class nuclear space engine by 2030. The Director General of the corporation, Alexey Likhachev, announced this important stage in space exploration.
Our alliance with Roscosmos in a separate federal project, both the lunar space station and the megawatt-class engine for rockets, is the contribution of nuclear energy to the exploration of near and far space. The prototype should generally be created before 2030
What is a nuclear space engine
The project is being implemented as part of a joint program with Roscosmos. It is expected to become the technological basis for the future lunar station.
Earlier it was reported that the development of a nuclear space engine is being carried out by the efforts of forty leading Russian scientific organizations, including the Keldysh Center and the Kurchatov Institute. Scientists are creating a transport and energy module that surpasses modern chemical rockets in all key parameters. The system is based on a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor that uses a mixture of helium and xenon to transfer energy.
Engineers are building a compact and super-powerful nuclear power plant for operation in a vacuum. The use of molybdenum alloys allows the reactor to withstand heating up to 1500 Kelvin and operate non-stop for more than one hundred thousand hours. This resource is enough for a spacecraft to not only reach the outskirts of the Solar System, but also return back.
