Why Nuclear Power Is The Key To Elon Musk’s Mars Colony

how do we generate electricity in Space the sun would be an obvious answer but you might be surprised to learn that even sunlight is not reliable enough to power Humanity's expansion beyond the Earth if we are going out into space then we need to bring nuclear reactors along with us and this is how some very smart people are going to make that happen there is probably no better example of the crossover between space exploration and nuclear power than the California startup radiant this company was founded by a man named Doug bernauer he was an engineer at SpaceX for 12 years before setting out on his own and during that time in the space flight industry Doug worked on some of the company's most critical projects when he joined in 2007 SpaceX was in the process of certifying their initial Falcon 1 rocket it would take four attempts for Falcon 1 to successfully reach orbit and Doug was one of the engineers who worked on that fourth rocket booster then he moved on to developing and installing the ground support systems for Falcon 9 he worked on the project grasshopper which was the first vertical takeoff and Landing rocket test at SpaceX he helped develop the first Falcon 9 booster with Landing legs and also contributed to Elon musk's Secret ative Mars project all that to say Doug is a certified very smart person and when people like him have ideas that they are passionate about it's probably worth taking seriously so Doug is a huge supporter of Elon musk's overarching mission to make human life multiplanetary and one of the things that Doug realized in his time working with Elon was that solar power will not be enough to establish a human presence on mars or the moon either the example he's used is that you can land a rocket on Mars with all of the hardware to extract resources and synthesize rocket fuel in situ but in order to provide the energy necessary to power that Fuel Depot you'd also need to install three football fields worth of solar panels and a large battery system with several megawatts of storage capacity alternatively you could integrate a very small micro nuclear reactor into that Fuel Depot rocket and have all of the power that you need that is what Doug and his team are pursuing with radiant their first product will be a portable nuclear micro reactor that can be easily and safely transported in the back of a truck or the cargo bay of an airplane a reactor that can go anywhere in the world from the bottom of the ocean to the top of a mountain to the Arctic Circle and if radiant can accomplish that goal of a go anywhere portable reactor on Earth then they can easily build one that will fly to space now putting the reactor into space will probably be the easy part trying to develop and test a brand new innovation in the field of nuclear power within the regulatory environment of the United States that's the hard part there's probably no better example of iterative design than what SpaceX is doing with their starship rocket they build test explode build again launch crash redesign explode it's a ton of fun to watch obviously if your nuclear reactor explodes during a test then you can't just go oopsie and build a new one and try again even a single failure is going to be very bad for pretty much everyone so we are not saying that regulations and restrictions on nuclear energy are bad not at all but it does make iterative design a lot more difficult for radiant and with such an ambitious goal of making nuclear reactors exponentially smaller and cheaper than ever before that means this is going to be a long and slow road to travel even very wellestablished legendary companies like Rolls-Royce are working towards the goal of a space fairing micro reactor their concept is potentially a little further along than Radiance but they still only have some very nice concept renderings to show for it Rolls-Royce is focusing its research on three essential areas of the micro reactor the fuel used to generate heat the techniques to ensure efficient heat transfer within the reactor and the technology that converts the generated heat into reliable electrical power even with a recent 5 million British pounds of funding from the UK space agency rollsroyce is not expecting to start testing their reactor design in space until the end of the decade but they'd actually be far from the first people to experiment with this kind of thing you might be surprised to learn that there's already a 60 year-old nuclear reactor in space as with pretty much all things in space exploration the US government was experimenting with launching nuclear reactors into space way back in the 1950s and' 60s they were also straight up nuking space as well with giant bombs we have another video on that you can watch later but nuclear power in space was explored under the snapshot program and not very many people know this they actually did succeed with their mission kind of there is a relatively small but not insignificant nuclear reactor up there floating around above our heads right now project snapshot was all about testing nuclear reactors to power satellites in orbit around the Earth snap stood for systems for nuclear auxiliary power and this was a joint operation between the US Air Force NASA and the atomic energy commission what's particularly interesting about snapshot is that it also included testing of a cesium ion Thruster which was the first ever electrically powered spacecraft propulsion there were two potential Atomic power sources that snapshot was investigating one side of the program was using radioisotopic Decay which is essentially just a natural process of unstable radioactive atoms shedding excess particles and energy in the form of radiant heat that heat can then be converted through a thermal couple into electricity the Decay will continue until the atoms stabilize and are no longer radioactive remember that point for later the other method explored was good old nuclear fishing reaction bombarding uranium atoms with stray neutrons to split the atom and release energy this method had the potential to generate a lot more power but has the downside of being much more complex it took several iterations but the program finally settled on a nuclear fishion reactor code named snap 10A this was the Year 1961 in order to create a nuclear reactor that was small enough to fit inside an early satellite while also capable of generating 500 watts of power snapshot highly enriched uranium as a fuel source 93% that's a higher concentration than nuclear bombs which are typically around 80% your typical nuclear power plant uses 3 to 5% enriched uranium 5 and 1/2 kg of uranium fuel rods were packaged by hand into the snap 10A reactor before it was loaded into a satellite and prepared for launch on April 3rd 1965 the US Air Force launched a nuclear fishing reactor into orbit around the Earth it settled into an altitude of around 1300 km or 800 m above the surface in a retrograde polar orbit meaning that instead of going around the equator it orbits over the Earth's polar regions the reactor test was supposed to run for 1 year it broke down after 43 days due to a faulty voltage regulator on the spacecraft they were able to test the electric ion engines powered by the nuclear reactor for about an hour before it also failed now if you've been wondering about the safety of a nuclear reactor floating around up there you'll hopefully be relieved to know that snap 10 isn't scheduled to re-enter the atmosphere for another 50700 years plus I'd be much more worried about the 30 or so nuclear-powered satellites that the Soviet Union put up there back in the '70s and 8s who knows what those things are up to but that's a whole other video as well NASA did end up launching several nuclear powered spacecraft of their own over the years but for these relatively small deep space missions they opted for the radioisotopic Decay power source this is how the Voyager probes have been able to continue doing science observations as they travel far beyond the solar system it's also what powers the latest generation of Mars rover Curiosity and perseverance because just like Doug burnau told us earlier solar power is not sustainable for longterm operation on Mars we can use solar to get things started but longterm we need need nuclear energy to explore beyond the Earth this even goes for the moon which may be a lot closer to the Sun than Mars but is actually an even less likely place for solar power to succeed you see the biggest problem that we've had with trying to explore the Moon is the lunar KN we get 14 Earth days of continuous sunlight which is fantastic for solar powered exploration but then we experience 14 days of night which tends to leave any Lander or Rover totally dead and frozen solid a few have been able to wake up when the sunlight returns but it's far from an ideal situation when we look at NASA's Artemis plan for a permanent human settlement on the moon a lot of that hinges on exploring the bottoms of giant impact craters at the lunar South Pole now the advantage of the South Pole region is that it is mostly exempt from the lunar day and night cycle there are places where the sun always shines but all of the resources that we need to sustain a legitimate presence on the moon are at the bottom of those craters in regions where light from the sun has never penetrated we're talking permanent Darkness so the pursuit of nuclear energy in space is only going to accelerate in the years to come as the Americans the Chinese and Elon Musk race to stake their claims on the moon and Mars small portable and Powerful nuclear fishion reactors will have an important role to play