If Congress found a half trillion dollars tomorrow for a down payment on a mission to Mars, how would we get there? For more than 50 years, a hard core of rocket scientists has promoted a propulsion system that holds, in roughly equal measure, promise and danger: nuclear.


Finger in the early 1960s.
No nuclear rocket aficionado has been as active as Harold B. Finger, the former head of the U.S. nuclear rocket program and a man whose involvement with the American space program predates NASA’s creation. This week, the 86-year-old Finger will advocate for nuclear propulsion at a space conference in Dallas. He has written, “the technology of nuclear rocket propulsion was fully demonstrated as ready for flight mission applications… Let’s do it!” Harold Finger is, far and away, the most fascinating rocket scientist you’ve never heard of.

“A young punk”
Finger joined the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA), a precursor to NASA, in1944, when he was “just a young punk” fresh out of engineering school, according to an interview he gave to a NASA historian in 2002 (pdf).

Finger became part of a nuclear group at NACA that tried to figure out how to shield pilots from nuclear plants in aircraft. The group did experiments such as installing a one megawatt nuclear reactor in a B-36 Peacemaker Nuclear Bomber – though it was never used to propel the craft – to see what kind of shielding the crew would require to escape radiation exposure. The concept of nuclear aircraft was eventually scrapped too. The last, best remaining idea for nuclear propulsion was space.

Mission to Mars
By the time of NASA’s founding in 1958, it was considered possible, probable even, that man would ride a nuclear powered rocket into space and the destination would be Mars. In 1960, Finger was made the manager of the Atomic Energy Commission – NASA Space Nuclear Propulsion Office and he set to work testing nuclear propulsion systems. In an article for Astronautics magazine in 1961, he wrote, “Although we may not be able to overtake the Russians in the race for the moon… I believe we are ahead in the race for manned exploration of the planets.” The reason was nuclear rockets.
[link to www.txchnologist.com]