Noodling on Nuclear Engines
One day in 1982, Joseph “Rod” Canion and two colleagues from Texas Instruments sat down at the House of Pies in Houston and used a napkin to sketch out what would become Compaq’s portable PC. In 1996, Felix Zandman, founder of Vishay Intertechnology, …
A New NASA Design Turbocharges Nuclear Spacecraft
The biggest threat to any crewed expedition to Mars is time. NASA’s shortest blueprint for sending people to the Red Planet and back requires spending 620 days in space and 30 days on Mars. Even setting aside the compounding challenges of building lif…