SPAR Institute Begins Latest Effort to Develop Nuclear Propulsion for Space

The United States Space Force allocated $35 million to the Space Power & Propulsion for Agility, Responsiveness & Resilience - or SPAR - Institute to develop nuclear-powered systems for spacecraft propulsion. 

The Institute demonstrates the latest effort by the Space Force, in partnership with the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) to explore nuclear fission as an energy source in space. If successful, nuclear energy can enable the Space Force to “maneuver without regret,” among other capabilities. 

In this episode of, “The Elara Edge: Expert Insights on Space Security,” Elara Nova partners Donna Dickey, an aerospace engineer with decades of experience at Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), Dr. Brad Tousley, former director of the Tactical Technology Office at DARPA, and Dr. Tom Cooley, former chief scientist at AFRL, explore the past, present, and future of nuclear propulsion in space.

"The Elara Edge" is hosted by Scott King and produced by Regia Multimedia Services. The full story can be found on Elara Nova's Insights page here. Music was produced by Patrick Watkins of PW Audio.

Transcript

Host: Scott King

SME: (DD): Donna Dickey, partner at Elara Nova: The Space Consultancy; aerospace engineer with decades of experience at Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Air Force Research Laboratory 

(BT): Brad Tousley, PhD, partner at Elara Nova: The Space Consultancy; former director of the Tactical Technology Office at DARPA

(TC): Tom Cooley, PhD, partner at Elara Nova: The Space Consultancy; former chief scientist at Air Force Research Laboratory

00:02 - 01:26

Late last year, the United States Space Force allocated $35 million to the Space Power & Propulsion for Agility, Responsiveness & Resilience - or SPAR - Institute to develop nuclear-powered systems for spacecraft propulsion. 

The institute demonstrates the latest effort by the Space Force, in partnership with the Air Force Research Laboratory - or AFRL - to explore nuclear fission as an energy source in space. If successful, nuclear energy can enable the Space Force to “maneuver without regret,” among other capabilities. 

Traditionally, maneuvering in space has been generated through electric or chemical propulsion, both of which have their respective limitations. Nuclear fission, however, which splits an atom’s nucleus within a controlled reactor to generate energy, carries significant advantages compared to its electric or chemical propulsion counterparts.

Welcome to “The Elara Edge: Expert Insights on Space Security.” I’m your host, Scott King. We have three guests today, for a roundtable-style discussion on the use of nuclear energy in space. 

Donna Dickey is a partner at Elara Nova the Space Consultancy, and an aerospace engineer with decades of experience working with agencies like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - or DARPA - as well as the Air Force Research Laboratory.

Donna, welcome to the show.

01:27 - 01:28

DD: Thank you.

01:28 - 01:39

Also joining us is Doctor Brad Tousley, a fellow Elara Nova partner, and the former director for the Tactical Technology Office at DARPA. 

Dr. Tousley, thanks for taking the time to join us today.

01:39 - 01:40

BT: Thank you. Glad to be here.

01:41 - 01:50

And then we have Doctor Tom Cooley, an Elara Nova partner and the former chief scientist at the Air Force Research Laboratory.

Dr. Cooley, thank you for joining us.

01:51 - 01:52

TC: Absolutely, glad to be here.

01:53 - 02:04

As mentioned at the top, the United States Space Force directed $35 million to the SPAR Institute to develop nuclear-powered spacecraft propulsion.

But what is the SPAR Institute, and the purpose behind this funding?

02:05 - 04:27

TC: The Space Force with luminaries like Joel Mozer and others really recognizing and wanting to focus the basic research investment at universities, towards things that are going to be game-changing for the Space Force. 

And so amongst other things, this type of university consortium idea emerged.

And one of the topics that really stems from, General John Shaw's catchphrase, “maneuver without regret,” meaning that we need to be able to operate and maneuver satellites without having to think about how much the lifetime of that satellite has now been spent, because we have just used fuel that would otherwise be used for station-keeping and whatnot.

That concept of maneuvering without having to think about the cost of this national asset [that] has just been diminished because you have maneuvered is one of the concepts that really has shaped much of the sort of long-term thinking and goals for the Space Force.

It's very clear that maneuver is a critical capability for the Space Force. And that was not something that we had to think about in the past. And so when, Joel Mozer and others, looked at, ‘Well, what are some of these long-term big ideas and capabilities that are going to require major technology breakthroughs?’

The ‘maneuver without regret’ certainly informed that. And when they were talking about what could universities sink their teeth into and provide a viable option and viable capabilities for the future. I mean, we're talking about the long-term, right? That we're not thinking these are going to be operational capabilities in a year or two.

This is fundamental research that needs to be done. And so when they were standing up these university consortiums, this was one of the key ideas that emerged: nuclear power in space.

It's long been identified, but we just haven't been able to bring it into the portfolio. And so ‘How do we do that?’ It's the kind of, really meaty question that we can put into academic worlds and have them sort through this. And so that's, if you will, some of the origins.

And then with the award going to the University of Michigan to lead that effort, bringing together a lot of other really top universities that are able to contribute different components to this. That's how it was formed.

04:28 - 05:25

BT: Scott, if I could jump in, one of the additional points I want to add to what Tom just said is that, SPAR is an example of, I'll call it a university research initiative. The Department has used these techniques many times before to catalyze universities focusing on a particular challenge or a particular area the Department needs. 

And it does two things:

One is it focuses them on the problem. And so in this case, the Space Force can engage with the Institute to specify details of the problem in a way that can be very collaborative. 

The other piece of it equally as important, if not more so, is the human capital side of it. The graduate students and the students that come out of the Institute can help go into the Space Force or supporting the industry in general in this area for the long-term.

And that's something that these university research initiatives tend to set up. When you have a five-year project, you'll get a bunch of students all the way through a Master's or Doctoral program focusing on different areas of the technology that is needed in this case for, in this case, space nuclear power and agility and that could be really beneficial as well.

05:26 - 05:39

And as it relates to “maneuvering without regret.” I have a two-part follow-up question:

1. What does “regret” look like in space?
2. Say we have this capability - what opportunities does that open up for the Space Force?

05:40 - 07:03

TC: So what space hasn't really had is the in-space logistics. Clearly, there's a lot of work that goes on with logistics on the ground. But in terms of in-space logistics and by logistics we mean refueling and just upgrades or maintenance repair, anything like that. We just haven't done that because it's really hard to do in space.

You have to get to the satellite. You have to be able to operate on that satellite. You have to refuel. Otherwise, I mean, there's we need to think through that. And so what does regret look like? 

Well, it means that, ‘Gosh, you know, something broke. You used all your fuel. 

You now no longer have an otherwise perfectly good asset in space to do a critical national defense job.’ And so regret is losing that asset because of the inability to have that logistics chain that again, we sort of take for granted. 

So, that's the main thing is that we really have to start thinking through, ‘How do we get that kind of space-specific logistics?’ And it all comes back to being able to get to and from your satellites, maneuver them.

Put them where you need them. If you lose an asset on one side of the GEO belt, and you've got a perfectly good one on the other side. ‘Well, how much fuel is it going to take and how long will that take?’ And that's a trade. That's a very direct trade.

07:04 - 08:05

BT: Scott, I also think that from a pure physics perspective, the latent energy in the nuclear reaction is simply far more per unit volume compared to chemical or standard electric and we know that on Earth. But the part of the problem on Earth is there's a regulatory issue in terms of the safety. But if you think purely in terms of the physics and the energy density and what's possible, you can get a whole lot more when you rely on nuclear power, but you have the regulatory, you have the policy, the concerns with debris and all that, and that's inhibitive.

But if you can successfully get past that, it completely changes the architectures and systems in space that - we depend on for resilience. Well, one of the reasons for proliferation is we're concerned about resilience. So we're just going to send a whole lot more things up there because we're concerned about the resilience.

Once you go back and you rethink of it in terms of nuclear power as a source in space, it completely changes all of those considerations. The ability of moving an asset around that we have, to be resilient against the threat, to be more survivable, to provide distributed ISR capability.

It all changes once you have nuclear [power] in space. All of it.

08:06 - 08:08

DD: And you wouldn't have such big solar panels or any at all.

08:09 - 08:11

BT: Exactly, exactly. Absolutely.

08:12 - 08:31

I’d like to pause here and dive deeper into the two primary energy sources that we’ve traditionally used in space: electric propulsion and chemical propulsion. 

Let’s start with electric propulsion, which Donna, you just indicated is commonly generated through solar arrays.

Can you share more about the benefits or limitations of electric propulsion in space?

08:32 - 08:55

DD: Sure, to start with the limitations: electric propulsion has very low thrust, so maneuverability is limited. And it depends on energy from the solar arrays, which trickle power into the batteries. 

Low thrust is absolutely fine for many spacecraft, but for maneuvers like collision avoidance in congested space - you’d rather have much higher thrust and reaction times also.

08:56 - 09:47

BT: In terms of ISP, electric propulsion is just wonderful. The problem is that you can't generate enough power with conventional means to power electric propulsion to get substantial impulse that you need to really change an orbit quickly. 

You can with nuclear power. But you can't with electric. But electric is extremely efficient. So they tend to be used for station-keeping for long-duration missions, for things where I can afford to have a much lower impulse per unit time.

The power-added efficiency from a solar array. The advancement in the last 15 years has been very linear. It’s very incremental. There's no factors of ten improvement in a solar panel. So if you think of a solar panel conductor, solar drive assembly and ride it through the bus to some propulsion system, it's very linear.

There's no factors of 10 or 100 improvement. There just isn't. And so in order to get more power, you just got to get bigger, bigger, bigger arrays. So [if] you can shrink those arrays to almost nothing. It gets a whole lot better for a variety of reasons.

09:48 - 09:57

TC: And they don't work in eclipse.

So, you've got to calculate that and oversize it with batteries and the like. That's not something you need to do with a nuclear power [source].

09:58 - 09:59

And then what about chemical propulsion?

09:59 - 10:42

BT: Well, chemical is the standard like we're thinking about today's traditional chemical thrusters. And the capability there is the ISP is a little bit less. The impulse is a lot more, but there's a limited amount of it. You are volume-constrained or weight-constrained. So there's architectures being considered.

Well, I’ll just refuel on orbit. Well that comes back to logistics. Now I've got to launch it, right? Now, I go back to the launch weight from the surface of the Earth. I mean, one of the discussions of going to the moon is, from the water ice, can I extract hydrogen and oxygen to make chemical propulsion on the moon?

Because the gravity is a lot less and I can get things off the moon as opposed to launching it from Earth [I can] launch it from the moon. But once again, this is coming back to chemical, which can be consumed relatively rapidly compared to nuclear.

10:43 - 11:02 

DD: You really just want the heat that it creates. The heat that you can get from a reactor is much better than the heat you can get from a chemical reaction and combustion.

And that's where you get twice the efficiency of a chemical rocket and yet you still get the thrust of a chemical rocket. So it's kind of the best of both worlds.

11:03 - 11:22

Thank you. Now, the SPAR Institute is looking to develop a means for deploying nuclear energy in space - specifically through “nuclear fission.” 

But still, the term “nuclear energy" can be a pretty loaded one in today’s world - especially in national security circles.

So can we clarify what we mean by “nuclear energy” in the context of this conversation?

11:23 - 12:08

TC: Yeah, I think the main thing is to differentiate nuclear energy from a nuclear weapon. And a lot of times the public doesn't necessarily understand that. And probably the main concern for this community is the policy.

And if we look at the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, it's very clear to not put weapons of mass destruction and specifically nuclear weapons in space and so that's not what we're doing. We're not putting a nuclear weapon. We're using nuclear technology to simply generate electricity. So if you go back even in the 80s and some of the key most successful space programs that we've had, we had RTG, radio– help me out, Brad.

12:09 - 12:10

BT: Radioisotope thermal generation.

12:11 - 12:43

TC: It's one of those terms that we, an acronym that we all know what it means, but you forget what it means. So those were the core of the Voyager, and anything that's going to the outer planets and that is fundamentally nuclear technology, nuclear energy, for the source of energy. So that’s what we’re really talking about is using nuclear energy, but using it as a reactor. So that is a harder thing to do. It’s taking - I’ll put the stink bomb out there and say it’s taking the Three Mile Island reactor. Making it safe to launch [and] putting it in space.

12:44 - 13:49

BT: Another factor to think about, Scott, is nuclear weapons: the uranium or plutonium is assembled in a critical fashion.

It's driven together to design and create an uncontrollable reaction. That's for the maximum energy consumption. 

And in the case of a nuclear reactor, it is critical. But you got a moderator in place that is designed to control the reaction in a way that you can sustain it for a very long period of time.

And then, you leverage that in the case of hydrogen or whatever for chemical propulsion effects or combined effects, or you can use it just to generate electric power. 

I mean, I think that's one of the reasons why some of the early studies about well, going to Mars specifically with chemical versus nuclear thermal.

It's like you get 2x half the transport time with what's available today. So that shortens everything up. I think the reactors can operate quite a long time. It's going to be well past the lifetime of the spacecraft. So that's one of the issues with nuclear power in space is the policy side of disposal.

What does disposal mean? Where do you send it? Where do you put it? Particularly, if the reactor is going to be long-lived compared to other spacecraft, or how do you shut it down? 

From a mission-assurance standpoint. I mean, all those things are part of the trade space.

13:50 - 13:56

Can you share a little bit more about what Three Mile Island was and how events like it influence the public’s perception of what nuclear energy means?

13:57 - 15:33

BT: Yeah, so I would put this way: Up until Three Mile Island, Japan, France and the United States, in the free world, were probably the three leading countries in examining and using nuclear power for peaceful electric power generation purposes. 

And the accident at Three Mile Island, which stories [have been] written about the series of errors, human and machine and otherwise, that unfolded. It basically caused a couple of reactors to go through a partial meltdown. 

And the impact of that on U.S. public policy. And the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Atomic Energy, it basically set us back in the development side of nuclear power for decades. Japan and France continued forward. We didn't. It never changed the physics. But the bottom line was the accident caused a complete change in the public mindset of whether this technology is safe.

That's the long story short. But, yeah, the Japanese have had their own problem, though. They had - it was actually a trip I took with DARPA in 2014, we went to see Fukushima, which was where they had the great undersea earthquake in the Fukushima prefecture.

And the Japanese had a similar problem with the tsunami hitting the plant. So they've had their own. The French have never had a major accident. The Russians of course had Chernobyl. But it doesn't change the physics of it.

And I'm hoping this time around with a lot of the new capital, with the need for AI data centers, for the desire to go to space with longer range systems, I'm hoping that this time around, we'll we're going to get ourselves the next step beyond past limitations.

15:34 - 15:41

So where do we go from here?

And how do we evaluate the trade-offs between those advantages, against some of the challenges that still need to be overcome?

15:42 - 17:55

TC: Principally again, if you could have a maneuver without regret. So essentially implementing an electric generator or nuclear electric generator that you could then utilize a high efficiency, high ISP, electric propulsion. And now, if you have 100kW, kinds of scale of power available, then you can start to get some pretty decent thrust out of that.

When we talk about electric propulsion, we kind of mentioned it earlier, we're talking about very, very low thrust. We're talking about very low force because it's that ion thruster that's using a very small amount of that ion. You know, I mean something like xenon, and then accelerating that to very, very high speeds using the electrical energy and then being able to change the Delta V of your spacecraft. We usually think about it in terms of micronewtons or even millenewtons, right?

On that scale of force from one of these electric ion thrusters. If you go from, again, having hundreds to 1000W to now 100,000 or a megawatt, you can again reasonably put that into an ion thruster and now you're getting into a Newton, type of force. Now that doesn't hurt your head so much to think about.

Well, what will it take to actually change your orbit, change your altitude or change your inclination? All of this takes a lot of thrust, a lot of Delta V. So, that's really the principal reason why the Space Force has become interested in it. 

However, there are a lot of other things that you could do with this kind of energy and if we sort of shift over to our NASA brethren, if you want to spend any time on the moon, you're going to spend 14 days in daylight and 14 days in night, unless of course, you're standing right on the pole. 

But that's a very, very harsh, harsh environment. And you're going to want something that's going to heat it. You're going to need energy. And so it's a very logical thing to be looking at nuclear energy for human habitation on the moon, even in Mars, you need to have some sort of source of energy that is not dependent upon the sun, which requires then a bunch of batteries. So this is the basic, sort of things that are driving initially, the push for nuclear energy.

17:56 - 18:18

DD: And then you get the bigger engines.

Even in the ‘60s, the earliest reactors they had were 300MW. So you can imagine they can get 1500 seconds of thrust and at 55,000 pounds. So, that enables going to the moon much quicker, going to Mars much quicker. And not having people spend 18 months in a can.

18:19 - 19:18

TC: So there's one thing that we haven't yet talked about, but it's that you're generating all this heat.

You use the heat to turn it into electricity somehow have to get rid of that excess heat. That is one of the major drawbacks from going this route. The good news is organizations like DARPA, and others have been looking at materials that, again, can maintain much higher temperatures and be effective radiators for a higher temperature nuclear reactor. 

So that's one of the reasons I think that's forcing this discussion, is that we can start to see a path towards developing those technologies that will make your thermal management system not the same size as your solar cell of equal generation and that's almost your beginning point for most of these satellites is how big do I have to build my thermal radiator, in order to have…and you know what, Donna, what you just said is a 300 megawatt. Like, wow. How big would that heat thermal radiator be? That’s big.

19:19 - 19:21

DD: The amazing thing is that the engine was not that big.

19:22 - 21:35

BT: That just goes to show the power that these nuclear systems for electric purposes can generate is enormous. The phrase that was given to me was “Yeah, Brad. What good does it do to remove whatever 2000m² of solar array on a satellite if I've got to turn around to replace it with 2000m² of radiators? You're still launching a lot of mass with the radiators, as well.

So I'm hoping that the SPAR Institute, one of the things they can work on, is new techniques for thermal management and heat rejection. How do you do that? It's going to be a big problem. It just is.

So, they talked about the capabilities. When I think about the risks there's really three things that pop to mind.

One is risk on-launch. And there's just the whole nature of: do you launch the system integrated? Do you launch it distributed? You can imagine taking reactor components and launching on three different spacecraft, three different launches. There's different ways of doing it, but there's a risk on-launch. And there'll be regulatory, there'll be policy, there'll be mission assurance of that. So that's one thing that has to be addressed and will be addressed and it's just the challenge we're going to have to work through. 

The second is mission assurance during operation, just because I launch and get it into orbit, I've got to have the mission assurance, like any other system, to make sure that it’s going to operate in a nominal way during its entire mission lifetime. So that's the second parameter. So if people thought that mission assurance was already stringent, it's going to go to a whole new level when it comes to nuclear power systems in space. 

And then the third is disposal. At end of life, there's a whole set of risks and trades about how you do that. And even in fact, if you look at the Committee on Peaceful Use of Outer Space back in ‘92, were thinking through some of the principles of nuclear power sources in space.

And they talk about what's okay. It's okay to do a nuclear reactor - RTGs - for interplanetary. That's not a problem. It's okay to put them in high orbits. And it's okay to put it in low-Earth orbit. But you gotta be able to store it in high orbits afterwards. This is all because - in the example of interplanetary, it's not coming back.

So disposal is billions of miles away from me. Well, what does that mean in LEO, HEO, MEO or GEO? So there's a whole set of things that deal with disposal and how that is effectively done. So that's the way I think of the risks: launch, mission assurance in operation and disposal.

And all three of those must be addressed.

21:36 - 21:41

DD: I would also add collision avoidance. Goes with the requirements on the spacecraft to be maneuverable.

21:42 - 22:15

This is not the first time that the United States has looked toward developing nuclear energy for space. 

And primarily, there are two ways nuclear energy is being developed, the first being “nuclear thermal propulsion,” or NTP - which uses a propellant to split an atom within a nuclear reactor to generate heat, which then can create the thrust to maneuver a spacecraft.

One program that looked at this approach was the Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application - or NERVA - which ran from the mid-1950s to the 1970s.

What's the story behind NERVA?

22:16 - 22:53

DD: So there was a precursor called the Rover program, kind of Air Force and the Atomic Energy Commission. And then NASA came in and took over in 1959 from the Air Force. And it's an upper stage engine, using nuclear thermal propulsion and with hydrogen as the propellant.

They developed several reactors. The amount of power they could produce increased, and then they integrated it into an engine and started testing in 1964, and then went all the way through to the end of the program. And they [held] multiple tests, multiple reactors in terms of like 20 reactors. And, they never did launch it. Unfortunately.

22:54 - 23:13

BT: My understanding from going back through the history was Congress started to defund it in 1967 because of the cost of the Vietnam War.

They were balancing that versus a whole bunch of other national security things. And then I guess Nixon actually canceled the entire program in ‘73. But like Donna said, they did a lot of work and made tremendous progress. But - no launch.

23:14 - 23:20

And can you elaborate on some of NERVA’s progress? How would you describe the program’s legacy, today?

23:21 - 23:47

DD: I think it gave you a bunch of engineers and the experience to know how to deal with it and what policy problems - I'm sure they looked at launch and what it was, and it gave people an idea of how you would run a program for the future - which I think leads to things like DRACO and other programs that are going because without having that as the precursor and knowing you could even fire it, which they did on the ground.

Let us know that it's possible.

23:48 - 24:05

BT: I'm biased, but technically this goes to the Three Mile Island thing, Donna. I wonder if the TRISO approach -  where you launch the pieces and either humans or autonomous systems assemble it on-orbit.

Maybe more tractable from a mission assurance standpoint and a safety on-launch that may help get past some of this. I don't know.

24:06 - 24:17

DD: And autonomous, additive manufacturing, everything has come so much farther that perhaps you can put the risky part on a smaller, very reliable launch vehicle, and you can take more risk with the other parts.

24:18 - 24:38

Now, we just mentioned DRACO, which actually leads into my next question. DRACO, or the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations, is an ongoing program overseen by DARPA. 

Dr. Tousley, based on your previous experience with the agency - can you explain what the DRACO program’s goals and objectives are?

24:39 - 26:37

BT: So DARPA started the program. It's important to remember that DRACO was done, started, and is being executed in collaboration with NASA. There are two programs going on these days that are in direct collaboration with NASA for a variety of reasons: technical, policy, Outer Space Treaty. One is DRACO and the other is LunA-10. 

They're both being done because whether it's nuclear reactors in orbit or whether it's infrastructure on the moon, both of them have to be in strict compliance with the Outer Space Treaty and public and policy perception. 

In the case of DRACO, it's focused on nuclear thermal propulsion. It's focused on the demonstration of the capability in orbit. I will say that the program is in the process of being re-baselined.

I will say that the program has a lot of technical challenges. We mentioned thermal management. That is arguably the biggest challenge that program is dealing with, is effectively managing the thermal dissipation and how that’s structured in a spacecraft, so that's one piece technically and we'll see where it goes. 

I do want to point out if we're going to refer back to NERVA, when I looked at a line in the numbers: in 1970 dollars, they spent $1.3 billion on NERVA over the life of it. So if you consider 1970 to today's dollars, [that will] give you an idea of the magnitude of what they spent at that time.

We haven't come close to that with DRACO and JETSON and all the rest of them. We haven't even come close. So it’s a huge amount at that time, maybe that's 8 to 10 times the amount compared to today in terms of real dollars. 

But the one thing that gives me promise is, separate from DRACO and JETSON. The fact that a lot of private and venture capital is flowing into this because they assess the potential of the value of nuclear power on the ground and in space. The fact it's coming into it. Maybe this time it's going to help the government together to get over the hump of the funding and the challenges.

It's not easy. It's just not easy. So we're going to have to get the staying power. But DRACO right now, they’ve re-baselined. I know they've got technical challenges, and I know they have program challenges that DARPA and NASA together are working through.

26:38 - 26:43

Can you elaborate on that disparity in funding available? 

Is it just the risk-averse nature of the “nuclear topic?”

26:44 - 28:11

BT: So, think of three things: there's how much money do I spend on a project versus where can I spend it elsewhere? There's the regulatory and policy. And then there's the conservative mindset.

I don't mean public, but I mean just reticence to try something new and risky. I think all three of those things combined make nuclear projects more difficult to work through. It's not just in space, it’s on the ground as well, because you will always find people that say, “Yeah, you can do that, but I can do it this way. It may need more coal, it may be more natural gas. It may need something else. But I could do that today, because it's safer.” 

‘Yeah, nuclear is much better. But look what's happened in the past. Look at Three Mile Island, look at Fukushima, look at Chernobyl. What if that happens?’ So I think that just makes…and I’ll be blunt because I met the former director of the National Nuclear Regulatory Commission as a part of the Defense Science Board.

It just makes the NRC really, really, really conservative. The effective risk posture is no mistakes. None. The French have dealt with this for years, and they don't seem to have the same mindset of zero tolerance for any mistake. They have a risk management profile that allows them to deal with it. 

Three Mile Island; nobody died from it. Nobody. I went to Fukushima and saw how the Japanese, they are going to spend thousands of years cleaning the land up the way it originally was. The Russians with Chernobyl, they just dug a hole and buried everything, right?

So we don't have to be like that, but our mindset surely got to be a little more tolerant of risk calculus to allow us to make progress. The physics don't lie. It's always going to be wonderfully efficient.

28:12 - 28:45

Now, I’d like to shift to the other process for leveraging nuclear energy - and that is nuclear electric propulsion - or NEP.

This process uses nuclear fission to positively charge gas propellants, which in turn generate electricity to power an engine.

One such effort looking at this is JETSON - or the Joint Emerging Technology Supplying on-Orbit Nuclear Power - program.

Dr. Cooley, I understand you have a direct connection with JETSON from your time as chief scientist at the Air Force Research Laboratory. 

So can you share what the JETSON program aims to accomplish?

28:46 - 31:13

TC: Yeah, sure. So let me tell you what I know about the JETSON program. And we really have to go back to the Department of Energy in Los Alamos who had a small program that was, I'm gonna call it a “hallway experiment,” because it was not well-funded, but it was to develop a small reactor, and run that for a period of time.

And that was, if I recall correctly, it was called KRUSTY and so out of that program, some of the engineers up at Los Alamos National Laboratories formed a small company called Space Nukes. And so Space Nukes had, again, this heritage of working on a very low power and I don't recall - several just kilowatts of power.

So in the grand scheme of nuclear reactors, again, we're very much on the low end of this. But it started the idea of, “Well, can we take this relatively small device and use that for all the benefits that we've talked about in terms of space energy?” 

And so the JETSON program really emerged from that idea and, with Space Nukes and a number of other larger primes who are involved in that, including Lockheed Martin.

But essentially, if we want to understand what exactly was announced or what the program is, it is funding Intuitive Machines based in Houston. You have again, I've mentioned Lockheed Martin, Westinghouse. All of these companies are looking at, I'm gonna defer to Brad in terms of some of the risks associated with it, but to take a small reactor like what was done, in the hallway of Los Alamos.

And I believe they did that actually out at the Nevada Test Site that they've created this small reactor and can you get it into space? And so the purpose of that is, again, to go back to electric thrusters, so, powering an ion thruster using this electric energy. But the hard part of this really is the reactor getting that into space safely, so that you can use it for, again, myriad purposes. Specifically, though, for the Space Force funding, as a thruster.

So this is just a really important distinction. The DRACO program is a nuclear thermal propulsion, NTP, and the JETSON program is NEP, nuclear electric propulsion.

31:14 - 31:30

Now, I also want to call out a separate government looking to develop a mobile nuclear reactor that can be used for primarily land-based purposes: and that’s Project Pele by the Strategic Capabilities Office. 

Dr. Tousley, what relevance does Project Pele have to this conversation?

31:31 - 33:16

BT: Yeah, Scott. So Project Pele, is an attempt to develop a prototype reactor and put it on a military base to demonstrate the efficacy of essentially remote power sources for basing that are in distant places, right? And the Strategic Capabilities Office has been looking at this. The reason I think it's important to note this for consideration is that in this case, investment and research development for terrestrial power sources can affect longer range advancement for small modular reactors that could be used in space.

And so I think that's something to note that the nuclear power industry is watching as the Department advances, in this case a small modular reactor that could be used on a military base. Military bases have different regulatory authorities of what they can deploy on their own. In the particular case of Project Pele, the construct is there's a base up in Alaska, Eilson Air Force Base.

It's very remote. It's difficult to get fossil fuel sources in there in the winter to resupply. So they're greatly constrained about when the logistics that can show up and support that base exist. The theory is if we get a small modular reactor up there to power the infrastructure, to power some of the systems that are up there - that would be a lot wiser to do that.

So that's why SCO helped to pay for this project going forward. Some of the same performers that Tom pointed out on JETSON are in the trade space of consideration for these small reactors. But the reason I bring it up is it's in the Department. It's under different authorities and policies. They're doing it for terrestrial mobile power purposes, but if they make progress and they develop it - I think it's going to continue to help the business case for continued investment to get through the challenges in space, as well.

33:17- 33:29

So, now that we’ve reflected on some of the historical and ongoing programs developing nuclear energy. What happens if we're ultimately successful in finding a way to safely and efficiently deploy nuclear energy in space?

33:30 - 33:38

DD: Obviously going to the moon, going to Mars and making a more efficient use of space in our own cis-Earth space.

33:39 - 34:03

BT: Yeah, I completely agree, it means you can move around without regret. It means, “Hey, maybe I can put systems on the moon that I can't today. I can operate through the night. Maybe I can start thinking about true manufacturing, logistics, and resupply in space in a way I can't do today.” I could see a future where you dedicate all kinds of reusable launch to get nuclear capabilities up in orbit.

You assemble it up there, and then everything in space is powered with nuclear. I could imagine that 100 years from now.

34:04 - 34:07

DD: And that opens us up to the resources of what the solar system.

34:08 - 34:11

BT: Absolutely. [It] changes everything - changes mankind's assumption on everything.

34:12 - 35:28

TC: It really does. One of the other things, too, that I get excited about and I think is really emerging is all the debris in space.

When you think about how many rocket bodies we've launched historically, all this material is up there that is essentially a danger to operating in space. You have to keep track of it. Not so much the big pieces as the little pieces, because there are so many more of them. But the idea of being able to reuse all this material that's there, you have to re-manufacture that. You cannot do that without a tremendous amount of energy, both to actually go grab the thing and maneuver it where you need it, but then also to actually turn it into something useful, right?

This also goes for, again, using in space natural resources. If you want to go catch an asteroid. We need to be thinking about those types of opportunities. You can't do that unless you have a lot of energy and you have some infrastructure. 

And to Brad's point, that's exactly the kinds of things that nuclear energy will start to flip the thinking to where we can utilize all these dead rocket bodies that we've put up there, other satellites, other things of that sort. Solve two problems at once: Building the future infrastructure, at the same time, cleaning up the old one.

35:29 - 36:35

BT: What I learned one time was, thinking through sailing ships, steamships, to nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. When the United States went to a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, it was because the distances and the deployments we had, put such a burden, infrastructure-wise, on conventional fossil fuel-based sources to get our ships around the world that with Rickover and others, we got over the hurdle - the whole regulatory side of it.

The nuclear Navy's incredibly safe and now the entire U.S. Navy really depends on nuclear power for a global power projection. Well, if you think about the heavens, my gosh, there's no more of a natural analogy of using nuclear power in space than how we changed the U.S. Navy's operations globally with nuclear power. It makes perfect sense. I mean, like Tom said, for lack of a better term, imagine if you had a nuclear-powered recycle truck or trash truck in space.

It might make sense to use that to clean up all of LEO of all the dead satellites. It doesn't make sense with conventional propulsion to do that, but with nuclear, it might make perfect sense. And then you clean everything up once at the end of life, you don't have to de-orbit it at all. You move it some ways distant into outerspace.

You know, It just changes everything.

36:36 - 36:46

On this idea of “recycling” or even extracting natural resources in space - what value does a spent rocket body or an asteroid have in a “recycled” or second life, so to speak?

36:47 - 37:47

TC: You kind of have to think of it as a raw material resource. You're not going to use it as is, but you're going to need to break it down. Now, that depends on what you're starting with, but let's just assume we have to go back down to its raw material basis. The only way you're going to do that is with a lot of energy and then again, have the infrastructure.

This is not going to happen in the next 5 to 10 years. This is a long-term goal. But if we in the United States want to be leading that change, leading that new emerging industry and capability, we need to be investing in it now and being willing to take the risk.

Going back to what Brad sort of laid the groundwork: we have to be not so timid, and so scared of the specter of a Three Mile Island, which thanks for pointing out - no one died from that. We need to be thinking more broadly about how do we advance these technologies and enable companies to emerge and support them with policies, support them with the technology that it's going to take to ultimately bring about that future.

37:48 - 38:08

And then how about In-Space Assembly and Manufacturing (or ISAM)? 

Dr. Tousley, you suggested earlier that one solution to getting nuclear-powered systems into space might be launching materials separately before assembling the system together in space.

So what opportunity can ISAM serve in this nuclear energy in space question?

38:09 - 39:10

BT: My thought about the in-space assembly and manufacturing of nuclear reactors is very specific. The biggest concern with launching a reactor is the material itself. It's not the reactor structure. So you could imagine, for example, if you launch the reactor structure with one rocket and then the material, whether it's TRISO pellets or otherwise, you launch them in distributed launches elsewhere where they're actually spatially separated on the launch vehicle, the risk of an accident, or the risk of re-entry of any of those is minuscule at that point.

The problem is when you put it all together in an existing infrastructure and then you attempt to launch it, there is some concern in the mission assurance community that something bad could happen on re-entry. But one of my points was if you separate them, you separate the material from the actual structure of the reactor itself. You can separate things in a way that the risk goes almost to zero.

That's just an example of how creatively we can make sure that we're adhering to the Outer Space Treaty, and we're adhering to safe, effective mission assurance practices.

39:11 - 39:34

Now, I’d like to bring it back to the SPAR Institute - a multifaceted effort across eight universities and 14 industry partners, that are all tackling different aspects of the nuclear energy development problem.

So how does the SPAR Institute reflect the collaborative approach - between government, industry, and academia - that is necessary to address these complex problems in national security space?

39:35 - 40:16

BT: I mean, if I remember correctly, I think University of Michigan is the lead. They've been involved in quite a few really demanding R&D projects in the past.

I know they've got a strong group on propulsion, electric propulsion. It looks like it's a five-year effort, $35 million. That's why it's smaller in comparison to other programs and efforts. But one of the reasons I made the comment about human capital is - that I would argue that the biggest benefit we're going to get from that is going to be funding these graduate students to work in an area that is critical to us.

So, in other words, they may only work on this effort for 2 or 3 years, but then they could end up working in the industry, supporting the U.S. government in this for the next 30. That's the value. It's the collaboration. It's getting these people engaged.

40:17 - 40:44 

DD: You know, one thing we're not addressing is what other countries are doing.

Competition is really the key. Having things like the SPAR Institute just creates new businesses, new technologies, and it just keeps the American engine going.

If other countries are doing that, their engines are going too, and we want to do some things that lift all boats. But I think we should really focus a lot on doing it for ourselves and knowing that it will lift other countries, too.

40:45 - 41:15

BT: At least with DARPA, I think DRACO and LunA-10 are examples of the U.S. government and NASA working together in a way that reinforces the value of the Outer Space Treaty and yet enhances our technological advancement in a productive way.

It's not clear that other countries truly merge their civil and their government space programs together in a way that supports the Outer Space Treaty as opposed to ruptures it. But I know that we spent a lot of time as a nation focusing on doing things collaboratively, in that way.

41:16 - 41:25

And what about commercial and industry partners? What opportunities exist for them to be part of this effort in finding a solution, through programs like the SPAR Institute - or otherwise?

41:26 - 42:31

BT: There are a number of companies that are getting into 21st century small reactor concepts. Believe it or not, I don't think it starts with space. Most of the money is flowing in. It's coming from private capital. It's coming from a lot of the big technology companies specifically for one reason, and that is that it's pretty clear that the nationwide demands on data center needs for processing, computation and memory are driving huge growth in data centers.

And because of that, it's pretty clear that that growth is going to drive stresses on the United States power grid. And I think a lot of these data companies know it and many of them are investing their own money in new starts that are focused on advanced nuclear reactors and power systems. They realize it's going to be 10-15 years to get through all the regulation side of it, but they believe that there's a pony there, and so many of them are investing in that.

I think the U.S. government's going to benefit from that in terms of people, technology advancements. They'll be questioning business practices, the policies, all that. The U.S. government is going to benefit from that. I'm bullish on that.

42:32 - 42:45

I want to go a step further on this role of private capital. We discussed earlier some of the funding shortfalls that resulted from events like Three Mile Island.  

But can you share more on the value private capital can provide in overcoming those funding shortfalls?

42:46 - 44:11

BT: So, I'll put it this way in the past Three Mile Island the infrastructure necessary for nuclear power is enormously capital-intensive.

And it was a question of well, are we going to go down the nuclear path with all the challenges? Are we going to default back to traditional fossil fuel-based approaches. After Three Mile Island, the assumption was we're going to go back. Don't want to deal with this again. We have all this electricity that we could gain from hydroelectric.

I'm not even going to include solar because it's contribution is so minuscule. But solar, oil, natural gas, coal those things can generate most of the baseload production we need. What's happened in the last ten years is the rate of growth of demands on the power grid from the data centers has grown so fast, and the criticality that the United States and the economy is so important that the U.S. government didn't need to convince a bunch of companies this is going to be important.

A bunch of these companies all by themselves, realize the cost per kilowatt hour is going to go up. It's going to put more of a demand. This is a supply and demand challenge. They realize the demand is growing and so they've identified a portion of their capital is dedicated to venture capital investment in these new companies. Compared to - I'll just put it bluntly - compared to DRACO, JETSON and Pele, it's going to dwarf that and I think the U.S. government will benefit from that.

The thing, I will say, they won't invest in the we that we have to think about in the Department and from an Elara Nova standpoint. The challenge the JETSON and DRACO both have is this thermal management issue. They're not going to address that. Nobody else is going to focus on thermal management in space.

They're not.

44:12 - 45:32

TC: I'll just chime in and say that I agree with Brad's assessment that the terrestrial demand for nuclear energy is going to drive the train. And, I'm really excited, though, to know that there are a number of space-focused companies that are thinking hard about how to bridge that gap, and think through all the safety and assembling something in space.

If it's up to me, I would suggest that we should have a program that's not DRACO. That's not JETSON. That's going to think through and enable other companies to enter this and learn the lessons about how do we do this safely? How will we assemble something in space? Can we focus the ISAM community, for example, on this very problem?

Those are the types of things that I think very much fit into the role of government. And that I'd like to see the government, take the leadership role and then give something like, a vision for investment communities, for companies to rally around and know that there's going to be a longer-term funding stream as well as an end user at the end of the day.

Those are some really important components to be able to actually take all of the great seed corn that we have going into a program like SPAR and put it into a brand new industry.

45:32 - 45:40

And to really drive home the opportunity of using nuclear energy in space - what would this capability mean for the Space Force and its Allies?

45:41 - 45:59

DD: So they can maneuver without regret.

Spacecraft are going between 7 and 17,000 miles an hour. So it's not easy to change your orbit. And it takes either a lot of fuel or a lot of time. Maneuvering without regret means having satellites and systems that can eliminate regret with new capabilities.

46:00 - 46:13

BT: It'll allow us to maneuver without regret and in particular with our partners and allies. We can collaborate with them on the capability, enable them to do it as well. And I think it'll change the entire free-loving world's ability to protect our space assets and be resilient.

46:14 - 46:29

TC: Yeah, I think that's exactly right. We want to be able to drive the train in terms of policy, how it's used. Again, utilizing the resources that today is space debris. Those are the types of things we want to be on the front-end instead of watching others do that.

46:30 - 46:49

Each of you are partners at Elara Nova: The Space Consultancy. How does the complex nuclear energy discussion we had today - from its opportunities and risks, to the technical, policy and funding challenges that still need to be overcome - represent how Elara Nova is well-suited to be a key partner in these challenges?

46:50 - 47:39

BT: I think there's 3 or 4 things, critically, we could do. Number one, we can support companies that are trying to grow into this area. From the standpoint of those that are outside of the U.S. government, they want to get in - that's one thing. 

I think we can help bridge the gap on discussing and talking to folks about some of the policy challenges, because at Elara Nova we do have a lot of folks that are former military, former Space Force that understand that. 

I think we could help ring out some of the wheat from the chaff on the technical stories. So if there's companies that have technical capability, but they want to get an assessment from folks that understand technically the challenges and understand how the Space Force operates, we can help them refine their messages in a way that's really productive for them.

And then the last thing I think is just from a transition standpoint as they achieve success. We can help them understand what are the challenges to the transition, the great work that they've done into operations and into production for the Space Force.

47:40 - 48:17

This has been an episode of The Elara Edge: Expert Insights on Space Security. As a global consultancy and professional services firm focused on helping businesses and government agencies maximize the strategic advantages of the space domain, Elara Nova is your source for expertise and guidance in space security.

If you liked what you heard today, please subscribe to our channel and leave us a rating. Music for this podcast was created by Patrick Watkins of PW Audio. This episode was edited and produced by Regia Multimedia Services. I’m your host, Scott King, and join us next time at the Elara Edge.