"I would say that, frankly speaking, the major rebirth and driving factor [for the space reactor program] is the President's strategic defense initiative. I think if it were not for that, we would be hard pressed to have a sufficient number of defined missions to sustain it at the levels we're talking about today. "[1] What were those "defined missions"? A few examples: • use of the SP-100 for battle management and kill assessment systems, survivable communications, weapons platform prime power, and orbital transfer electric propulsion system for deployment of SDI components; • use of the SP-100 to provide housekeeping power for the space-based neutral particle beam, free electron lasers, chemical lasers and hypervelocity guns; • use of the SP-100 to provide power to orbiting SDI space mirrors used in conjunction with ground-based lasers; • use of the SP-100 to provide power for SDI's space surveillance and tracking system. Needless to say, none of these missions came to fruition, nor are they likely to in the foreseeable future. The record of the last decade strongly suggests that the Strategic Defense Initiative distorted the development of the SP-100 program with misleading visions of orbiting weapons platforms powered by space reactors. The space reactor program was artificially accelerated in an attempt to satisfy mission requirements that turned out to be illusory. (This phenomenon, of course, is not limited to the SP-100 program, but is rather a function of SDI's ever-changing mission, goals, and proposed architectures.) By late 1991, SDIO had opted to withdraw from sponsorship of the SP-100 program. And although its successor, the renamed Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, maintains an interest in the Russian Topaz 2 reactor, it has no identifiable requirement for a space nuclear reactor. In June of 1993, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to terminate the SP- 100, citing the cost of the program and the lack of a clear mission. The Space Exploration Initiative Just as the nuclear rocket program emerged from the ashes of the nuclear airplane project in the early 1960s, much of the SDI nuclear reactor effort quickly found new inspiration in the Space Exploration Initiative, announced by President Bush in 1989. Although earlier concepts of human missions to the Moon and Mars had centered on chemical propulsion systems, the Space Exploration Initiative increasingly focused on nuclear propulsion options. As with the SDI program, evaluation of nuclear reactor options has been an exercise in technological archeology, with old concepts reviewed for their potential contribution to this latest potential mission requirement. But as with the
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTU5NjU0Mg==