The Russian space agency may build a nuclear-powered spacecraft with the blessing of the country’s leader, Russian and international media reported Thursday.

The craft would cost $600 million and Russian scientists claim it could be ready as early as 2012.

“The idea [of nuclear-powered spaceflight] has bright prospects, and if Russia could stage a breakthrough it could become our main contribution to any future international program of deep space exploration,” Andrei Ionin, an independent Moscow-based space expert, told Christian Science Monitor.

Building a nuclear-powered spacecraft is feasible, said Patrick McDaniel, a nuclear engineer and co-director of the University of New Mexico’s Institute for Space and Nuclear Power Studies, but probably not in the short time frame that the Russians have proposed.

“To have a test article that they could test on the ground, that’s very reasonable,” McDaniel said. “To have a completed system, that’s highly unlikely.”

If the spaceship actually gets built, it would complete a half-century quest to bring nuclear power to space propulsion, beginning with a 1947 report by North American Aviation to the Air Force.

It’s not hard to see why engineers would want to use nuclear power. Fission reactors provide a lot of power for their size, which is a key attribute in designing space systems. One engineer claims nuclear rockets are inherently twice as efficient as their chemical brethren. Their attributes could have increased the exploration range of the space program, nuclear propulsion advocates argue, allowing us to get to more interesting places.

“We could have done a lot more things in space. We could have gone more places,” McDaniel said of nuclear rocket research. “It’s highly likely we would have gone to Mars.”

The current plans to potentially return to Mars do not include a nuclear rocket, but several decades of plans from the 1950s through the 1980s just assumed that nuclear power would be a part of the effort to reach the Red Planet.

Toward that end, the Air Force, which preceded NASA in managing space programs, created Project Rover in conjunction with Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The goal of Rover was to develop a reactor that could be used for propulsion. Various incarnations of the reactor the scientists developed, called Kiwi, were tested at Jackass Flats, Nevada (see video). The idea behind the reactor was to use the heat generated by fission to heat hydrogen, which would expand, generating the force to push the rocket.

None of the reactors ran for more than eight minutes, but they were considered to have met their goals. Technically, they worked.

Later, the concept was largely abandoned just because no one really knew what to do with a nuclear reactor in space.

“Snap 10A was a technology demo, the question was then, well, what do we want to do with it?” McDaniel said. “And no one had a really good answer.”

Other, more fanciful nuclear propulsion ideas were proposed, too. One, Project Orion, would have been powered by nuclear bombs. The physicist Freeman Dyson, who worked on the project, told The New York Times Magazine he saw it “as the solution to a problem. With one trip we’d have got rid of 2,000 bombs.”

“Orion was a delightful scientific exercise, but not very feasible,” McDaniel said.

These various technologies cost money to develop, of course, and the scale of the cash that flowed their way shows how seriously Americans took nuclear propulsion. Between 1955 and 1972, the United States spent more than $1.4 billion in then-year dollars on developing nuclear rockets and related technologies. At the end of that period, when the Nixon administration cut NASA’s budget generally and NERVA’s specifically, the United States was well on its way to developing nuclear power for spacefaring and space purposes.

“It is indeed remarkable that the adoption of the Rover–NERVA database, upgraded and modernized by current rocket-engine technology, would fully satisfy NASA’s space transfer propulsion and long-distance exploration requirements and permit realization of a safe and low programmatic risk development programme,” wrote Stanley Gunn, who worked on the nuclear propulsion program for Rocketdyne, in a 2001 article for Space Policy.

There were several attempts to resurrect nuclear propulsion of various types, most recently the mothballed Project Prometheus. None, though, have garnered much support. One major reason is that NASA picks its propulsion systems based on its targets — and true exploration of the solar system and beyond hasn’t really been a serious goal, the Constellation plans for a return to the moon aside.

“The destinations dictate the power system,” said Rao Surampudi, a Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer who works on the development of power systems.

By and large, it’s cheaper and easier to go with solar power or very low-power radioisotope generators like the one that powers the Cassini mission.

McDaniel agreed that the targets drive things, citing the general decline of pure technology development research at NASA.

“Until we commit to going back to Mars, we’re not going to have a nuclear rocket,” McDaniel said.

Or perhaps a new nuclear-powered Russian spacecraft could get anxious minds at the Pentagon and NASA worrying about the need to keep pace with the Ivanovs.

After all, the Soviet nuclear rocket program may have been more advanced than the American efforts at the time of the USSR’s collapse.

Images: 1) A NERVA test engine going to the testing spot./NASA. 2) A proposed nuclear rocket to Mars rendering./NASA.

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