The Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) on Tuesday announced that it plans to begin work on standardized nuclear power plant modules for spacecraft next year.
Vitaly Lopota, director of RSC Energia, said that the first launches of reactors with a capacity of 150 to 500 kW could be carried out in 2020.
Earlier, the head of Roscosmos, Anatoly Perminov, said that the development of megawatt-class nuclear power systems for manned spacecraft is critical to maintaining Russia's competitiveness in the space industry, including exploration of the Moon and Mars. The project will require about 17 billion rubles. In addition, the corporation is working on the concept of an atomic space tug that could more than halve the cost of putting cargo into orbit.
A nuclear reactor used as an energy source for an ion engine is capable of taking astronautics to a qualitatively new level. The principle of operation of the engine lies in the ionization of gas and its acceleration by an electrostatic field to high speeds exceeding 210 km / s, which is much higher than that of classical chemical rocket engines (3-4, 5 km / s). Currently, ion thrusters are widely used in spacecraft. However, these are mostly low-power power plants with low thrust, since the ion engine requires a lot of electricity, measured in hundreds of kilowatt-hours.
Also, a nuclear reactor can heat hydrogen up to several thousand degrees and give a large jet thrust, without the need for an oxidizer.
In any form, a space nuclear reactor will be able to provide spacecraft with the necessary energy, thrust and provide a quick flight to the most remote corners of the solar system, where there is too little sunlight to use solar panels.
