Gaseous Core Nuclear Thermal Rocket

cjackson

http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/eng...Thermal_Rocket

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_core_reactor_rocket

How practical would this be? How much of a technological leap would be needed to achieve this?

Would it make outer solar system missions possible?

Could the technology be used for non space applications?

I bring this up because Discovery One from 2001: A Space Odyssey apparently uses something like this.

QuantumPion

Well we managed to build a fully operational solid core nuclear thermal rocket in the 50's. A closed-cycle gas core reactor is within our capability today I think, if we wanted to. I would guess that any manned mission to mars would use either nuclear thermal or nuclear electric.

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QuantumPion	Well we managed to build a fully operational solid core nuclear thermal rocket in the 50's. A closed-cycle gas core reactor is within our capability today I think, if we wanted to. I would guess that any manned mission to mars would use either nuclear thermal or nuclear electric.