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For other uses, see Nerva (disambiguation).
 NERVA is an acronym for Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application. It was a design for a nuclear thermal rocket engine.
[edit] HistoryThe NERVA rocket engine was based on Kiwi nuclear reactor technology (the original flightless nuclear thermal rocket designs were named after the Kiwi, a flightless bird native to New Zealand). In the early 1960s NASA planned to use NERVA to power a RIFT (Reactor-In-Flight-Test) nuclear stage to be launched in the early 1970s. The completed NERVA would be a nuclear powered upper stage for the Saturn V, which would allow the upgraded Saturn to launch interplanetary payloads. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center had the development responsibility for the rocket stage. From the beginning the program had a number of problems. It was very expensive. It never held much public support, owing to the growing anti-nuclear lobby in the United States in the early 1970s. There were environmental concerns and the test engines themselves never managed to produce more than 40% of their theoretical thrust, which made them less powerful than contemporary conventional rocket engines. Wernher von Braun also proposed a Manned Mars Mission using NERVA and a spinning donut shaped spacecraft to simulate gravity. Many of the NASA plans for Mars in the 1960s and early 1970s used the NERVA rocket specifically, see list of manned mars mission plans in the 20th century. [edit] In fictionIn Stephen Baxter’s alternate timeline novel Voyage the NERVA project is not canceled but development goes on throughout the 70s producing a test article Apollo-N in 1980. A disaster is concocted, with rushed deadlines, poor design and a fundamental lack of understanding of the technology, a single test fire followed by a restart in orbit that goes disastrously wrong ending in the eventual deaths of all the crew in an echo of the Challenger disaster. After the NERVA technology is abandoned as unsafe, a mission to Mars is launched using chemical rocket engines with a slingshot gravity assist via Venus allowing an expedition to arrive on Mars in 1986. In Chris Berman's novel, The Hive, the discovery of an alien device between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn in the year 2019 creates an emergency situation. This leads to a crash program with partners Russia and the United States to re-engine a partly complete manned Mars spacecraft with a NERVA rocket motor to send a team to inspect the device. The Chinese play 'catch-up' with a ground launched Orion nuclear pulse craft (which has led to the novel being banned by the PRC[1]). In the 1985 film “LifeForce”, the NERVA is the propulsion for the fictional space shuttle Churchill. A joint ESA/NASA, endeavour, the engine helps the astronauts circumnavigate the 1986 return of Halley’s comet. Though the 60 day survey goes awry, continuous acceleration provided by NERVA allows the film to be made with minimal (expensive) free fall effects and is used to explain an amazingly fast return to the Earth from the outer solar system. The MPC Pilgrim Observer Space Station Model kit was a speculative design for an interplanetary manned explorer. It features a NERVA engine as its main form of propulsion and its instructions included a description of the Pilgrim being launched by an "uprated" Saturn V. Though out of production, examples of this kit are available from various sources. In the 1980s novel Encounter Three, the NERVA program is briefly discussed. It is quickly dismissed as "Pushing more thrust through a smaller hole", and is dismissed as useless in the long-term. [edit] NERVA Rocket Stage Specifications
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