When spaceships start using nuclear power, they will have to take off from deserts with no unsheltered humans for miles around. Only the crewmen in their cabins will be fully shielded. As the ship ...

Saturday a.m. Update: Multiple former employees of the rocket company Vector in both California and Arizona have told Ars they were let go on Friday. Late Friday night, the company issued the ...

Artificial intelligence is quietly reshaping how rockets fly, how spacecraft sip propellant and how engineers think about the leap to nuclear propulsion. What began as a set of algorithms for ...

Novel propulsion ideas for moving around space seem like they’re a dime a dozen recently. Besides the typical argument between solar sails and chemical propulsion lies a potential third way — a ...

Launching rockets into space with atomic bombs is a crazy idea that was thankfully discarded many decades ago. But as Richard Corfield discovers, the potential of using the energy from nuclear-powered ...

Bad things do seem to come in threes and recent events in the launch industry have certainly proven that point over the past several days. Reading time 3 minutes It was an unfortunate week for the ...

After axing its research on nuclear-powered rockets in the 1970s, NASA spent $18.8 million last year on a deal with BWXT Nuclear Energy Inc. to develop fuel and a reactor to power a nuclear-thermal ...

NASA’s push for a new nuclear rocket engine is not just another upgrade to the hardware we strap to the bottom of spacecraft. It is an attempt to rewrite the basic rules of how far, how fast, and how ...