NASA's Nuclear Spaceship: Mars in 2028! #shorts

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:02]NASA is building a nuclear railroad to Mars.

[00:00:07]Right now, the agency is moving at an incredible speed to create and launch an entirely new kind of spacecraft in just 2 years.

[00:00:15]Right now, flying to Mars looks something like this. We launch a rocket just as the orbits of our two planets are making their closest approach during a window that opens once every 2 years.

[00:00:27]After burning through a colossal amount of rocket fuel, our Martian bound spacecraft will simply coast through space until it finally crosses paths with Mars. At which point we can drop a lander into the atmosphere, but the problem with the way we do things right now is that we've already started reaching the upper limits of what we can actually send to Mars. And the limiting factor right now is rocket fuel.

[00:00:52]Even when we look at the best possible scenario that exists for transporting the largest amount of stuff between the two planets, you'll see just how big this problem gets. SpaceX wants to land their Starship on Mars. It's a vehicle that requires the biggest and most powerful rocket booster ever made just to get itself into lower Earth orbit.

[00:01:11]Now, before that Starship can go anywhere else, we need to launch 10 more of the biggest, most powerful rocket booster ever made just to truck enough fuel up into space to refill the depleted Starship vehicle. And then, once that's all done, now it can fly to Mars.

[00:01:30]The upside is that a fully loaded Starship can now deliver the equivalent of about 25 SUV-sized NASA rovers, which again, would be amazing, but that's a lot of rockets. That's a lot of rocket fuel, and this can still only be done once every 2 years. So, there has to be a better way. It's called Space Reactor 1, and it will be the world's first interplanetary nuclear-powered spaceship.

[00:01:56]This is one of the key pillars to NASA's new direction under the leadership of administrator Jared Isaacman. And what makes the space reactor so exciting is that this is not a long-term goal or a future project. We are building this thing right now in 2026 and when the next Mars transit window opens in 2028, >> [music] >> we launch.

[00:02:18]Sounds impossible, right? Well, first let's clarify what we mean when we say a nuclear-powered spacecraft because that a few things. In the case of SR-1, it will use a nuclear fission reactor for both power and propulsion.

[00:02:34]Just to set our baseline here, nuclear fission refers to splitting the atom to release energy. It's the kind of reactor that has been used in every nuclear power plant on Earth since the 1950s.

[00:02:46]Now, in terms of using that to power an engine in space, there are two kinds of nuclear propulsion that we have to choose from.

[00:02:53]The first is nuclear thermal.