Lecture Starts at 14:39
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PSW #2480
September 8, 2023
Nuclear Propulsion Systems for Space Exploration: DARPA's DRACO Project
Tabitha Dodson
DRACO Project Manager, DARPA

DARPA, in collaboration with NASA, is advancing toward the goal of the world’s first in-orbit demonstration of a nuclear thermal rocket (NTR) engine via the DRACO project (Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations). DARPA has finalized an agreement with Lockheed Martin for the company to begin work on the fabrication and design of the experimental NTR vehicle (X-NTRV) and its engine.

The DRACO program aims to give the nation leap-ahead propulsion capability. An NTR achieves high thrust similar to in-space chemical propulsion but is two-to-three-times more efficient. A successful demonstration of an NTR could significantly advance humanity’s means for going faster and farther in space and pave the way for the future deployment for fission-based nuclear space technologies.

Towards that end, in January of this year (2023), DARPA and NASA signed an agreement to collaborate on developing a NTR engine, with an initial focus on providing the means to more efficiently and quickly transport material through the cislunar domain, and the longer term aim of people to Mars.

The DRACO program takes advantage of the nation’s early investments in nuclear thermal technology via the previous Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Applications (NERVA) program, but with a new fuel option that presents fewer logistical hurdles. DARPA is using high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) fuel, made possible via National Security Presidential Memorandum 20 (NSPM-20), which updated U.S. policy for the launch of space nuclear power and propulsion. As an additional safety measure, DARPA will engineer the system so that the engine’s fission reactor will stay turned off until it reaches its designated orbit.

The U.S. Space Force will provide the launch vehicle that will take the X-NTRV into space in 2027. The Department of Energy will provide HALEU metal. BWX Technologies (BWXT), one of Lockheed Martin’s partners in the effort, will develop the nuclear reactor and fabricate the HALEU fuel.

This lecture will discuss the history of NTR R&D efforts, the current DRACO program, and the prospects for NTR-enhanced space transportation and exploration, particularly regarding cis-lunar operations, NASA’s Artemis Program, and voyaging to Mars and beyond.

Tabitha Dodson is the Program Manager for the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO) program. Her interests focus on advanced space payloads, electric propulsion, astrodynamics, nuclear thermal and nuclear electric propulsion, overall rocket propulsion, advanced nuclear reactors, plasma physics and plasma engineering, nuclear/quantum/particle physics, and hypersonics.

Prior to becoming a program manager at DARPA, she was a Systems Engineering and Technical Assistance contractor with Gryphon-Schafer Government Services, LLC (within DARPA), where she served as the chief engineer of the DRACO program to build and test a nuclear thermal rocket. Upon becoming a government employee with DARPA she continued to serve as DRACO’s chief engineer, and also served as its deputy program manager.

Dodson has also served as Adjunct Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the United States Naval Academy and as Adjunct Professor in the Aeronautics and Astronautics Department of the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT). And she has held a variety of other positions within and for the U.S. Air Force, including as an aerospace engineer and senior scientist in the fields of spacecraft engineering, space missions and operations, space power, and space propulsion.

Dodson earned a BS in Physics, Sociology and Anthropology, an MS in Space Policy and a PhD in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the George Washington University and, in addition, a PhD in Applied Physics at the Air Force Institute of Technology.

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