Vince Houghton - Nuking the Moon - And Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Left on the Drawing Board

But Juno is the rare exception. In most cases, solar power carries significant limitations. Every other spacecraft that has traveled as far as Jupiter (and there have been eight of them) has used nuclear power instead of solar. Nuclear power, usually in the form of a slowly decaying isotope of plutonium called plutonium-238 (nuclear weapons use the much more volatile Pu-239), can support spacecraft in the cold and dark void of deep space, places where solar power can rarely do the job.

Among those that operated (or still operate) on nuclear power include:

• The Transit Satellite Network—The first satellite powered by plutonium, Transit 4A, was launched into space in 1961. Four of these nuclear-powered Transit satellites made up the foundation of an early U.S. Navy satellite navigation network used to guide submarines and ballistic missiles from space.

• Apollo 11—The first manned mission to the moon left behind a seismic monitoring system that relied on the Apollo Lunar Radioisotopic Heater, which used Pu-238 to keep the system warm during ridiculously cold lunar nights, when the temperature dropped to minus 243 degrees Fahrenheit. Each of the remaining Apollo missions used plutonium as well, but inside nuclear batteries that provided power to surface experiments.

• Voyager 1 and Voyager 2—These are the ones with the golden records full of images, audio clips, and information about the planet and its life forms that hopefully won’t be interpreted by alien species as a declaration of war. Voyager 1 has traveled nearly 12 billion miles on its three Pu-238 nuclear batteries. It is now the only human-made object that has reached interstellar space.

• The Mars Curiosity rover—About the size of an SUV, Curiosity landed on Mars in 2012. The rover is equipped with a stereoscopic camera (with which it sends back amazing pictures you can see online), a powerful microscope, and an infrared laser it uses to zap Mars rocks for, you know, science. Curiosity is powered by a 125-watt nuclear battery that should keep it {~ laser-blasting rocks~} conducting important scientific experiments well into the mid-2020s.

Most of us have no idea that these spacecraft were filled with radioactive fuel. It wasn’t a big deal anyway—if something went wrong with the plutonium, the impact would be confined to areas outside of the atmosphere, or even millions (or billions) of miles into deep space.

But what if you brought that nuclear fuel inside the atmosphere, and used it to power a conventional aircraft? Or what if you decided slowly decaying nuclear material was too weak to do the job in outer space, and you really needed something with more… punch?

In the 1940s and ’50s, the U.S. government attempted to develop two unique programs. One was an aircraft powered by a nuclear reactor. The other, a spacecraft propelled by nuclear explosions .

Yes, explosions.

You’d think Enrico Fermiwould have had enough on his mind. The theoretical physicist was one of the most important members of the team working to develop the atomic bomb during World War II. But while creating the first artificial self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction at the University of Chicago in 1942, Fermi was thinking big. What if we could use atomic energy for more than building bombs? Specifically, what if atomic energy could be used for the propulsion of aircraft?

These questions would have to wait, however. The development of the desperately needed bomb was the first and only priority. There wasn’t any uranium or plutonium to spare for side projects, no matter how potentially beneficial. It was the bomb, only the bomb, and nothing but the bomb.

But when the war ended, the U.S. Air Force (a lot of this story occurs after 1947, so I’ll use that name despite the fact that the USAF didn’t technically exist until 1947), with support from the newly formed Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), finally began to carry out studies on the feasibility of using nuclear energy to power airplanes. In 1946, the Air Force awarded a contract to the Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corporation to manage the multiple industrial firms brought in to work on the project, thereby officially starting the Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft (NEPA) program. The purpose of NEPA was to test the feasibility of the concept—can we pull this off? Most important, can American scientists and engineers develop atomic-powered long-range strategic bombers that can influence the global balance of power?

Think about it for a second. American bombers could stay in the air for days, weeks even. No need to refuel. An abundance of power. Always on station and ready to fly into harm’s way. It was the kind of thing an Air Force general’s dreams were made of. The perfect weapon for a Cold War. It’s no wonder why it seemed like such an obvious and tantalizing application to Fermi during World War II.

It just had to be built.

Apparently, the U.S. military thought it could be done. In 1951, the Joint Chiefs of Staff determined that a “military requirement” existed to justify the construction of a nuclear-powered aircraft, at which point the NEPA—which, remember, was created to test feasibility—was replaced by a joint AEC/USAF program known as ANP (Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion). The mandate of the ANP program was to take the NEPA concept and bring it to the next level: the full-scale development of aircraft reactor and engine systems that would propel the Air Force toward the ultimate goal, the deployment of a fleet of nuclear-powered strategic bombers.

The AEC was responsible for designing a nuclear reactor small enough (and safe enough) to install on an airplane. They were also tasked with figuring out shielding—how to protect the crew from the reactor’s radiation. The Air Force, in turn, was responsible for building the rest of the plane. The Air Force was ready to go, urging the AEC to move as quickly as possible to make this idea a reality:

There is a highest priority requirement for an intercontinental bomber capable of delivering, with acceptable attrition rates, any of our nuclear weapons on any target from bases within our continental limits. Recent studies performed by the Office for Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion indicate that a nuclear propeller aircraft possibly can be built which may meet this requirement by as early as 1960, providing the Air Force and the Atomic Energy Commission place sufficient priority on the solution of the difficult R&D problems involved.

Okay, guys, let’s get this thing done. Really. Let’s do this.

The AEC replied: It would, within the limits of its resources and such funds as might be made available within overall program priorities, continue to explore ways and means of…

You get the picture. The AEC didn’t share the Air Force’s urgency. Or maybe it did, but had so many competing priorities—like building and maintaining an effective nuclear deterrent—that it could only do its utmost to work with the Air Force “within the limits” of its capabilities.

And there were limits. Plenty of them. Enough so that the program muddled along throughout the majority of the 1950s without much progress, until the Soviet launch of Sputnik forced the government to take a serious look at what was happening. In October 1957, the Research and Development Subcommittee of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (a congressional committee that included members from the U.S. House and the Senate) made a direct appeal to President Eisenhower to put his full weight behind the ANP project. They explained:

Speaking frankly, Mr. President, the ANP program since its inception has suffered from a lack of incentive and initiative on the part of those who have been charged with the responsibility of conducting the program. It has also been characterized by the lack of any well-defined future objective, including target dates for completion, and has not had the kind of well-coordinated and centralized direction which is necessary for the successful achievement of such an extremely difficult research and development task.