Impacts of In Situ Alternative Propellant on Nuclear Thermal Propulsion Mars Vehicle Architectures

What is it about?

Water and ammonia were discovered on the Moon and NASA's Artemis program aims to utilize these resources for future crewed missions to Mars. It is proposed to electrolyze water into hydrogen and oxygen which requires a lot of energy. This research looks at using water and ammonia directly as a propellant and compares that to using hydrogen as a propellant in nuclear thermal propulsion engines. The results presented are in terms of impacts to the vehicle architecture.

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