Four years from now, if all goes well, a nuclear-powered rocket engine will launch into space for the first time. The rocket itself will be conventional, but the payload boosted into orbit will be a different matter.
Four years from now, if all goes well, a nuclear-powered rocket engine will launch into space for the first time. The rocket itself will be conventional, but the payload boosted into orbit will be a different matter.
Sounds risky AF
The higher orbit should mitigate most of those issues. There’s more space, so a dead craft is less of an issue. It takes long enough to reenter that most of the radioactivity will have decayed. The biggest issue would be a launch failure.
As with any technological advancement , there are risks, but if humanity is ever intending to become a spacefairing species, we will have to make peace with nuclear energy. It’s the only technology that comes anywhere close to making interplanetary travel feasible at large scale.