WASHINGTON: Precisely half a century ago this week, a rocket shot off from the California coast. It carried the U.S.’s first and only (identified) space nuclear reactor, SNAP-10A, which has been circling the Earth ever since and will continue to circle for yet another 3,000 years.
Back in the 1960s, NASA ran a Systems for Nuclear Auxiliary Power (SNAP) plan to study nuclear power’s possible in space exploration. This program sent up the first radioisotope thermoelectric generators, a technologies still made use of in space probes like Voyager and Curiosity today. Radioisotope thermoelectric generators aren’t nuclear reactors, although. They simply harness the heat from a decaying element, such as plutonium-238.
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SNAP 10-A was different. SNAP 1o-A was truly a functioning reactor with a controlled fission reaction inside. It contained enough uranium fuel to create up to 600 watts of energy for a year. Twelve hours soon after take off on April 3, 1965, it settled into orbit 500 kilometers above Earth and humans back on the ground remotely switched on the reactor.
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