Use of High-Power Brayton Nuclear Electric Propulsion (NEP) for a 2033 Mars Round-Trip Mission

The Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts (RASC) team, led by the NASA Langley Research Center, is tasked with exploring revolutionary new approaches to enabling NASA to achieve its strategic goals and objectives in future missions. This paper provides the details from the 2004–2005 RASC study of a point‐design that uses a high‐power nuclear electric propulsion (NEP) based space transportation architecture to support a manned mission to Mars. The study assumes a high‐temperature liquid‐metal cooled fission reactor with a Brayton power conversion system to generate the electrical power required by magnetoplasmadynamic (MPD) thrusters. The architecture includes a cargo vehicle with an NEP system providing 5 MW of electrical power and a crewed vehicle with an NEP system with two reactors providing a combined total of 10 MW of electrical power. Both vehicles use a low‐thrust, high‐efficiency (5000 sec specific impulse) MPD system to conduct a spiral‐out of the Earth gravity well, a low‐thrust heliocentric ...