NASA announces nuclear-powered Mars mission by 2028
The U.S. space agency will aim to send a nuclear-powered spacecraft to Mars—a first—in a bid to show that nuclear propulsion can be used to send missions into deep space
NASA has announced it will launch a nuclear-powered spacecraft to Mars before the end of 2028. The effort would mark a world first—no interplanetary spacecraft mission has ever been powered by nuclear propulsion before—and a massive boost for potential missions that would go farther out into space and travel faster than traditional liquid-fueled craft could manage.
The space agency plans to the launch the spacecraft, called Space Reactor-1 Freedom, to the Red Planet, where it will deploy several helicopters to explore the surface. The helicopters, NASA said in a statement, will be modeled on Ingenuity, which flew as part of the Perseverance Mars rover’s mission on the planet.
According to NASA, the mission will prove nuclear propulsion can power spacecraft “and activate the industrial base for future fission power systems across propulsion, surface, and long-duration missions.” These could include missions to planets and other bodies in the outer solar system. Currently, exploring these distant worlds would be impossible with traditional craft, which would require massive amounts of liquid fuel to travel such distances. Only spacecraft that are small enough to be battery- or solar-powered, such as the Voyager and Juno missions, have reached these outer realms of our solar system.
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Nuclear propulsion has long been touted as the solution to this problem, but it has never been proven to work in a mission. It is unclear what propulsion design NASA would use to test the system or if there will be any collaboration with industry.
Editor’s Note (3/24/26): This is a breaking news story and may be updated.
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