NASA looking into Nuclear powered space vessels
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As a qualified rocket surgeon (500+ hours on ksp, played children of a dead earth and I even played aurora 4x for 30 mins) nuclear powered vessels are essential for upstarting a space based economy. With regular bitch chemical rockets your fuel is most likely going to be produced planetside, then brought up to orbit by another rocket, thats a lot of waste and effort just to relief the fuel shortage for a short time. Nuclear fission rockets are many times efficient so the ammount of fissile material you have to restock is much more sensible, also the other propellant needed (hidrogen) is found on water, idk how the fuel creation process is done, but I feel like extracting hidrogen out of the moon/Mars is going to be easier and more efficient than to set up a refinery so you can manufacture kerosene
It gets better. Gene Roddenberry based his warp drive on the ideas of nuclear powered ships.
Well, maybe "ftl warp drive" wont exist irl, but thats no problem when it comes to exploring other stellar systems, the most viable way to reach the closest star within a life time would be the antimatter based drives. Antimatter production requires a lot of power and the magnetic confinement method of storing it is also power intensive, all of these just for it to decay very rapidly. If you manage to over come these problems, you have the most powerful drives ever created (more than chemical rockets) while being the most efficient (more than electromagnetic plasma drives)