Is it time to get serious about nuclear rockets? Here's what we need to know

Last week I revisited the topic of getting to and living on Mars and the different ways to get there faster than what we're doing.

And one of the subjects that came up quite often in comments, and I've mentioned it last week , was nuclear thermal propulsion.

It might open up the entire solar system to us.

Nuclear power is a form of propulsion.

The fissile radioactive material that you need to create the nuclear reactions, it is orders of magnitude lighter than the liquid fuel for chemical rockets.

Project Orion involved using nuclear bombs to blow up underneath the spaceship and use the force from those bombs to accelerate it higher and higher into the atmosphere.

The project was eventually canned because of the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963 .

Nuclear thermal propulsion, such a great idea, was killed in 1973 by Richard Nixon .

Now we're starting to get serious about putting human bodies out there in the vastness of space.

Time is an issue, the longer they're out there, the more they're in the shooting gallery of cosmic rays and the worse their health effects become.