Reality of Manned Flying Reactor

New concept for reducing dose radiation exposure, which helps to decrease the duration and cost of deep space human missions is introduced. This concept can be efficiently realized, using modern materials, such as carbon nanotube composites. The dream of a flying reactor, which takes advantage of a nuclear power to bring humans to other planets, has been around the corner for many years [1]. To develop such a spacecraft, NASA and other space agencies have established number of projects such as NERVA [2], Project Prometheus [3], etc. However they were closed due to serious budget and technical problems. One of the main problems is to shield the crew from the radiation of the onboard reac-tor. Traditional shielding was so thick and heavy that it would significantly complicate liftoff [1]. The current NASA Advanced Exploration System project with Nuclear Cryo-genic Propulsion Stage (NCPS) [4] has same challenge. At present, the mass of required traditional shielding exceeds 7 tones [5]. However this problem can be easily solved by making a spacecraft from two separate modules: nuclear booster and manned module, which are connected to each other by a long rope (several ropes for safety reasons) with length of order 1 km, as shown in Fig. 1, where α is the small angle between the rope line and the directions of jetstreams. Both modules should have a number of small orbit correction engines for making mutual maneuvers. The required rope(s) can be made of modern developing materials, such as carbon nanotube (CNT) composites, to reduce the mass of the spacecraft. A novel-processing approach to production of CNTs that can be easily scaled up for industrial production, was recently introduced in Ref. [6]. In particular, the CNTs were stretched by pulling onto the rotating spool, which improves the tensile strength of the CNT composite ribbon by approximately 90 percent (to an average of 3.5 gigapascals). The density of this stretch-wound composite is only 1.25 g·cm−3. Hence the mass of ropes is vanishing comparing to the rest of mass of the spacecraft. Usage of a nuclear engine without a heavy traditional shielding will significantly decrease the time of a spaceflight to Mars and other destinations, as well as the dose radiation exposure from cosmic rays. A