Nerva, revisited

I was just thinking of this yesterday.  Brian Wang of NextBigFuture has this little nugget of a news item about nuclear powered spacecraft.


The Wikipedia entry the power capability of this thing was rather significant.   This is a long discussion, so you may want to read the whole thing.

The NERVA rocket would also be a nuclear-powered upper stage for the Saturn rocket (the Saturn S-N), which would allow the upgraded Saturn to launch much larger payloads of up to 340,000 pounds to Low Earth Orbit.