Project Rover
Project Rover was a United States project to develop a nuclear-thermal rocket. It ran from 1955 to 1973 at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. The reactors were fueled by highly enriched uranium, with liquid hydrogen used as both a rocket propellant and reactor coolant. Nuclear graphite and beryllium were used as neutron moderators and neutron reflectors.
About Project Rover in brief
Project Rover was a United States project to develop a nuclear-thermal rocket. It ran from 1955 to 1973 at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. The reactors were fueled by highly enriched uranium, with liquid hydrogen used as both a rocket propellant and reactor coolant. Nuclear graphite and beryllium were used as neutron moderators and neutron reflectors. The nuclear rocket enjoyed strong political support from the influential chairman of the United States Congress Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Senator Clinton P. Anderson from New Mexico. The project was canceled over their objection in January 1973, and none of the reactors ever flew. In 1947, some scientists at the Manhattan Project’s Los AlamOS Laboratory, including Stan Ulam, Frederick Reines and Frederic de Hoffmann, speculated about the development of nuclear-powered rockets. In 1953, Robert W. Wussard, a working physicist on the Nuclear Aircraft Propulsion project at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, wrote a detailed study of a nuclear rocket with a solid-core graphite heat exchanger. The study was specifically aimed at an aircraft with a range of 16,000 kilometers and a payload of 3,600 kilograms, and covered turbopumps, structure, tankage, aerodynamics and nuclear reactor design. In December 1945, Theodore von Karman and Hsue-Shen Tsien wrote a report for the U.S. Army Air Forces. While they agreed that it was not yet practical, Tsien speculated that nuclear- powered rockets might one day be powerful enough to launch satellites into orbit.
The British Interplanetary Society published a series of papers in 1948 and 1949 on nuclear rocket propulsion. They reluctantly concluded that nuclear rockets were essential for deep space exploration, but not yet technically feasible forDeep space exploration. The report concluded that hydrogen was best as a propellant, and that graphite would be the best neutron moderator, but assumed an operating temperature of three,150 °C, which was beyond the capabilities of available materials. The paper was published in the Journal of the British InterPlanetary Society in 1948. In the same year, a physicist at the University of Cambridge, Leslie Shepard, outlined the design of a solid core nuclear rocket. This became the basis for Project Orion, which was later developed into the F-1 rocket. The F1 rocket was the first to carry a heavy-duty nuclear warhead into space, but it was never used for space travel. It was later used as a testbed for the C-2 rocket, which flew in the 1980s and 1990s. It is the only nuclear rocket that has ever been used for deep-space exploration, and the only one that has been used to launch a satellite into space. It has been the subject of a number of books, including the book “Nuclear Rocket: The Secret History of the First Space Rocket” by Richard Feynman and the author of “The Nuclear Rocket Project: The Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application” by Robert Bussard.
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This page is based on the article Project Rover published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 01, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
