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OSTP memo guides space nuclear plan
A White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memorandum released on Tuesday guides NASA, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Defense on their roles in deploying near-term space nuclear power.
This follows a series of NASA announcements last month—driven by the executive order “Ensuring American Space Superiority,” issued by Trump in December—including an ambitious timeline for establishing a moon base, which would rely on fission surface power (FSP) to survive the long lunar night at the moon’s south pole, and plans for a nuclear electric propulsion (NEP) rocket to be launched in 2028.
Patrick F. O’Rourke, Anil K. Prinja, Scott D. Ramsey
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 199 | Number 1 | April 2025 | Pages S180-S200
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2024.2439227
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
In this report, we study several aspects of the root spectrum of the coupled assembly probability of initiation equations to bolster confidence in the results of the companion paper, A. K. Prinja, P. F. O’Rourke, and S. D. Ramsey, “Probability of Initiation in Coupled Multiplying Assemblies.” We apply Bernstein’s Theorem to develop analytical expressions for the number of distinct nontrivial roots for two and three coupled assemblies and make inferences that the behavior holds in general. This result provides a benchmark number for the expected number of roots to be obtained when calculating the entire root spectrum. We employ a numerical method, the Homotopy Continuation Method (HCM), to obtain the entire root spectrum. We use the HCM to study parametric behavior of the root spectrum for subcritical and supercritical systems and compare with the Newton-Raphson Method (NRM) result, which provides only a single solution but is computationally favorable. We show that indeed the NRM and HCM agree (for a single root), and we further perform a stability analysis on the entire spectrum to show that the NRM result is the only stable root in the spectrum for the entire range of system criticalities. The results are demonstrated for systems consisting of two and four coupled assemblies.