

Trips to Mars in 39 Days  - codedivine
http://www.universetoday.com/2009/10/06/trips-to-mars-in-39-days/

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hughprime
That's great, but I wonder how heavy the nuclear reactor would need to be that
provides the 2 MW to power this thing. Is this something we could practically
loft into orbit with present-day rockets? (Ignoring the not-entirely-
unreasonable-in-this-particular-case environmental objections to flying
nuclear reactors through our atmosphere on failure-prone chemical rockets...)

I suppose, on the upside, that once you had this thing in space it could stay
there -- a nuclear reactor plus plasma rocket which could just shuffle back
and forth between Earth orbit and Mars/Jupiter/wherever, refuelling at every
Earth stop.

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lrm242
Sort of misleading. Near the end of the article it states that the 39 day trip
could be made possible by coupling a much larger version of this engine with a
nuclear reactor.

