Nuclear spaceflight, Iran war’s emissions crisis and a strong Lyme vaccine trial result
March 30, 2026
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Nuclear spaceflight, Iran war’s emissions crisis and a strong Lyme vaccine trial result
NASA’s nuclear Mars mission, the Iran war’s carbon fallout, the looming climate cost of rebuilding and a hopeful new Lyme vaccine
By Kendra Pierre-Louis, Lee Billings, Fonda Mwangi & Alex Sugiura
NASA/JPL-Caltech
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Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for Rachel Feltman. You’re listening to our weekly science news roundup.
Let’s start off in space.
[CLIP: Sound of a rocket blasting off]
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Last Tuesday NASA announced it will launch a nuclear-powered spacecraft to Mars before the end of 2028. And the agency also said it’s planning to build a base on the moon. SciAm’s senior space and physics editor, Lee Billings, is here to give us the latest updates on space exploration.
Lee Billings: Can I tell you more about NASA’s nuclear-powered Mars mission? Well, as a matter of fact, I can. And it’s really cool—there’s still a lot of stuff that is remaining to be disclosed or to be finalized, but in short it’s something called Space Reactor-1 Freedom, and it’s supposed to launch before the end of 2028.
And what it is, is it’s a nuclear-electric-powered rocket, or spacecraft, that will be transporting something called Skyfall to the Red Planet. And Skyfall is not a James Bond movie; this is three Ingenuity-style Mars copters that are going to be deployed onto Mars, and then they will be carrying cameras and maybe even ground-penetrating radar to scout out signs of—you guessed it—habitability and ancient life, perhaps even, on the Red Planet.
And really, the most exciting thing about this, in my opinion, is this nuclear-electric rocket, which would be the first interplanetary rocket of its kind like this in history, and the transformative capabilities that could bring to space exploration.
And so this was all announced last Tuesday by NASA at this event called “Ignition” in Washington, D.C. And one of the things that also was announced, in addition to this nuclear-electric spacecraft, was more details about NASA’s plans for a permanent moon base. And the reason that these things maybe were both announced at the same time is because they actually are somewhat related. If you want to have a base on the moon, an enduring human presence, and you don’t want all your astronauts to die, then having something like nuclear power on the moon is gonna be pretty significant and pretty essential.
Now, we need to delineate between something like a nuclear reactor that generates electricity on the moon, which is very useful for the very long lunar nights, it gets very cold and very dark, so solar power won’t work then. That’s one thing, but a nuclear rocket is something different. That’s where you use a nuclear reactor to generate electricity that then generates thrust, and you can get much more bang for your buck versus more conventional chemical-based rockets. So it’s different technologies, but they both rely upon nuclear reactions and really highly sensitive fissile material that, you know, can have other nasty uses and applications.
One obvious question here is: What does this really mean for space exploration writ large? Right now we are able to use solar power out to about Jupiter, but past that the sun’s light gets too faint, and it’s really tough to sustain a mission with sufficient power out there.
A lot of people would think the killer app for some kind of nuclear-powered rocket is sending people to Mars. And that’s because if you’re gonna use a chemical rocket for that, you’re talking about launching the equivalent of dozens of International Space stations over time just for fuel. And, you know, if you have a nuclear-powered rocket, on the other hand, it’s a lot easier. You need much less fuel ’cause nuclear power is very energy-dense.
With that said we’ve been here before in prior years, prior decades. There have been multiple pushes by NASA and other parts of the U.S. government to develop these capabilities, and each time they never quite make it to the launchpad. What’s really interesting and I think potentially very important this time is that we’ve never had a NASA administrator and all of NASA kind of united onstage together making the case that this is going to happen so, so clearly. And you really do get the feeling that maybe this time is different because maybe there&rs