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This 1968 film – originally titled as "Nuclear Propulsion in Space" – is a vintage documentary produced by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in cooperation with the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). The film details Project NERVA, an American rocket program, started in 1963, to develop a thermal nuclear propulsion system for use on long-range (lunar and interplanetary) manned space missions.

The documentary explains why the United States needed to develop the nuclear-powered rocket for deep space explorations and how the nuclear engine works. It shows authentic footage of the 1950s research in New Mexico to determine the feasibility of nuclear energy in rocket propulsion, development of engine technology via the NERVA project and engine testing. It also illustrates a combination of nuclear and chemical rocket stages that might be used in a future manned mission to Mars.

Please note, this documentary was produced in the year before the first moon landing of the Apollo 11 mission in 1969. As the narrator states, "Landing men on the Moon will be a truly great achievement but only the beginning of a new era in space exploration. No one can predict the exact missions that will follow in the years and decades ahead but the most exciting possibilities will require the acceleration and deceleration of very heavy loads such as the maneuvering of large Earth-orbiting spacecraft, the transportation of large amounts of equipment and supplies to the lunar surface and the sending of heavy spacecraft to the planets. Today's missions are being accomplished with rockets that burn chemical fuels but chemical fuels are heavy and the coast of putting each pound into Earth orbit is very high. Nuclear rockets when perfected can provide the same propulsion energy with less overall weight. They will expand our ability to explore space."


HISTORICAL BACKGROUND / CONTEXT

Project NERVA (acronym for Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application), was a joint program of NASA and the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) managed by the Space Nuclear Propulsion Office (SNPO) at the Nuclear Rocket Development Station in Jackass Flats, Nevada. The goal of the NERVA program was to take the graphite-based nuclear reactor built at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory under the Rover program, which had begun in 1955, and create a functioning rocket engine.

The NERVA and Rover programs ran in parallel and were considered by the NASA, AEC and SNPO to be highly successful programs from a technological standpoint. NERVA demonstrated that nuclear thermal rocket engines were a feasible and reliable tool for space exploration, and at the end of 1968 SNPO certified that the latest NERVA engine, the NRX/XE, met the requirements for a human mission to Mars.

The plan was to use a NERVA engine as the third stage of the Saturn V rocket and plausibly get to Mars by 1978 and even use this engine as the work-horse to establish a large lunar colony by 1981. These plans were canceled in 1972 once President Nixon came into office and decided that the Saturn V and the Apollo program were no longer needed to prove US technological superiority in the space race with the Soviet Union. Without the Saturn V, there was no way to place the heavy nuclear engine into space, even though once there it would dramatically out-perform any chemical rocket (the nuclear-enhanced Saturn V would carry two to three times more payload into space than the chemical version).

How it works:
A nuclear thermal rocket is a proposed spacecraft propulsion technology. In a nuclear thermal rocket a working fluid, usually liquid hydrogen, is heated to a high temperature in a nuclear reactor, and then expands through a rocket nozzle to create thrust. In this kind of thermal rocket, the nuclear reactor's energy replaces the chemical energy of the propellant's reactive chemicals in a chemical rocket. The thermal heater / inert propellant paradigm as opposed to the reactive propellants of chemical rockets turns out to produce a superior effective exhaust velocity, and therefore a superior propulsive efficiency, with specific impulses on the order of twice that of chemical engines. The overall gross lift-off mass of a nuclear rocket is about half that of a chemical rocket, and hence when used as an upper stage it roughly doubles or triples the payload carried to orbit.

For more information about Project NERVA, see:
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Nuclear Propulsion for Manned Mars Missions | NASA Documentary | 1968

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