"Jay" at BehindTheBlack reports on another dossier-generator, this time on NERVA. Although the Ars Technica article is a fine one.
They've dug back into the old NTP documents, found where they had problems, and are fixing those problems. Also they're considering HALEU so bypass some of the nuclear-proliferation worries they'd had.
The article blames Nixon, who concentrated on low-Earth-orbit for American interests, leaving deep-space probes for robots. I actually think Nixon was... correct. We needed cheaper kilograms-per-dollar. NASA and Big Space weren't getting us that - still aren't.
With Starship, if the lawyers will let it happen, we are looking at serious construction in the Terra-Luna jacobi <3 region; far enough up, NERVA starts making sense again.
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