NASA’s plan to put a nuclear reactor on a Mars-bound spacecraft by 2028 sounds impossible — until you realize the agency is quietly stitching together two programs that were never supposed to meet

Building a nuclear-powered interplanetary spacecraft typically takes a decade. NASA is trying to do it in roughly two and a half years — and the only way the math works is by welding together two programs that were never designed to talk to each other. The mission, called Space Reactor 1 (SR-1) Freedom, was announced [...] The post NASA’s plan to put a nuclear reactor on a Mars-bound spacecraft by 2028 sounds impossible — until you realize the agency is quietly stitching together two programs th