Modern Hiroshima Described (August 7, 1995) (Knight-Ridder Newspapers) “This was supposed to have become a dead city, a toxic landscape so contaminated by radiation that nothing green would grow for generations. A nuclear desert – that’s what even some scientists saw in Hiroshima’s future. Instead, today’s Hiroshima is a thriving, flower-planted, ultramodern metropolis of 1-million…
Under any circumstances, there is a very limited market for nuclear rockets. Even if space exploration is raised in the national priority list, the first mission to Mars would probably occur in about 2010. For at least a decade or more after that, trips would probably be infrequent at best. There would be some utility…
Before learning about nuclear rockets, we should take a quick detour to review how conventional rockets work. There is a perception that rockets are fiendishly complex devices that need to be serviced and designed by people whose intelligence is far removed from that of mere mortals. Often, people even use the term “rocket scientist” to…
I have a confession. I am a science fiction and space travel fanatic. I watched with rapt attention during the “race to the moon” even though I was quite young. I dreamed of being an astronaut, and made several visits to the Kennedy Space Center. My personal library includes a large collection of books by…
The Nuclear Engines for Rocket Vehicle Applications (NERVA) program officially began in 1961, when NASA issued a request for proposals and established the Space Nuclear Propulsion Office (SNPO). Various government laboratories had been studying the concept for several years, several contractors were already working on conceptual design, and space was a big topic of interest….