I’ve grown up with rockets that burn chemical fuel, but NASA’s next big leap in propulsion could make those engines look as dated as steam trains. By turning to nuclear power in space, the agency is ...

Get ready because the future of traveling to other planets just got a massive upgrade. Pulsar Fusion, a U.K.-based aerospace company, is developing a compact fusion engine called the Dual Direct ...

Russian engineers are betting that a radically different rocket engine can compress the long slog to Mars into something closer to an interplanetary commute. Their new plasma propulsion prototype, ...

Jim Bickford is leading the Thin Film Isotope Nuclear Engine Rocket (TFINER) project to develop a system for propelling a craft through space faster and farther than ever before. This technology has ...

A new kind of space engine could change how we explore the solar system, and it's powered by the same force that lights up the stars. A British startup called Pulsar Fusion is working on a nuclear ...

On Mars, NASA's Perseverance rover is settling in after landing last week. The space agency also hopes one day to send people to the red planet. But getting there will be tough. NPR's Geoff Brumfiel ...

Getting to Mars takes a really long time, about 9 months using today’s rocket technology. This is because regular rocket engines burn fuel and oxygen together (like a car engine), but they’re not very ...

From back: Brandon Wilson, Bryan Conry, Pavel Shilenko and Emily Hutchins gather around the Ohio State University Research Reactor before performing irradiation testing of the coated surrogate ...