Science
Nuclear Propulsion Could Help Get Humans to Mars Faster
This is from a NASA press release dated February 12, 2021…
As NASA’s Perseverance rover homes in on the Red Planet, engineers on the ground are furthering potential propulsion technologies for the first human missions to Mars. NASA is looking at two types of nuclear propulsion systems – nuclear electric and nuclear thermal propulsion.
Nuclear electric propulsion systems use propellants much more efficiently than chemical rockets but provide a low amount of thrust. They use a reactor to generate electricity that positively charges gas propellants like xenon or krypton, pushing the ions out through a thruster, which drives the spacecraft forward. Using low thrust efficiently, nuclear electric propulsion systems accelerate spacecraft for extended periods and can propel a Mars mission for a fraction of the propellant of high thrust systems.
Credits: NASA
Nuclear thermal propulsion technology provides high thrust and twice the propellant efficiency of chemical rockets. The system works by transferring heat from the reactor to a liquid propellant. That heat converts the liquid into a gas, which expands through a nozzle to provide thrust and propel a spacecraft.
NASA, in coordination with the Department of Energy (DOE), is asking industry for preliminary reactor design concepts for a nuclear thermal propulsion system. The agencies plan to fund several efforts to explore different approaches. Future follow-on contracts will generate more detailed reactor designs and build preliminary testing hardware.
“While NASA’s immediate priority is returning humans to the Moon with the Artemis program, we are also investing in ‘tall pole’ technologies that could enable crewed missions to Mars,” said Jim Reuter, associate administrator of NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD). “We look forward to seeing what innovations industry offer in nuclear propulsion as well as fission surface power via a forthcoming request for proposals for that technology.”
Human Missions to Mars
To date, only robotic explorers have traveled to Mars, without the need for returning to Earth. Waiting for optimal planetary alignment for the return trip would require astronauts to loiter at Mars for more than a year, stretching the round-trip mission to more than three years.
NASA’s goal is to minimize the time the crew travels between Earth and Mars to as close to two years as is practical. Space nuclear propulsion systems could enable shorter total mission times and provide enhanced flexibility and efficiency for mission designers.
To keep the round-trip crewed mission duration to about two years, at a minimum, NASA is looking at nuclear-enabled transportation systems to facilitate shorter-stay surface missions. The systems would take advantage of optimal planetary alignment for a low-energy transit for one leg of the trip and the new technology’s enhanced performance to make the higher-energy transit for the other leg.
It’s too soon to say what propulsion system will take the first astronauts to Mars, as there remains significant development required for each approach.
Illustration of a spacecraft with a nuclear-enabled propulsion system. Credits: NASA
Technology Readiness
NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, leads the agency’s space nuclear propulsion project in partnership with a DOE team that includes scientists and engineers from Idaho National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. STMD’s Technology Demonstration Missions program funds the technology development.
Nuclear electric propulsion builds on NASA’s work maturing solar electric propulsion thrusters and systems for Artemis, as well as the development of fission power for the lunar surface. Significant investment has also been made in relevant fuel and reactor technologies for small, terrestrial reactors that could be adapted to space reactors to power electric propulsion. The U.S. government’s aim to establish a fuel fabrication capability has a range of applications, including nuclear propulsion and fission surface power.
Credits: NASA/Mick Speer
Nuclear thermal propulsion has been on NASA’s radar for more than 60 years. The new hardware design and development phase pursued through a request for proposals released Feb. 12, 2021, builds on existing efforts to mature crucial elements of a nuclear thermal propulsion system.
NASA, in partnership with DOE, is developing and testing new fuels that use low-enriched uranium for space applications to see how they perform under the extreme thermal and radiation environments needed for nuclear thermal propulsion. NASA is working closely with DOE, industry, and universities to put fuel samples in research reactors at Idaho National Laboratory’s Transient Reactor Test (TREAT) facility and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Nuclear Reactor Laboratory for nuclear testing. The team is also performing non-nuclear testing in simulated reactors at Marshall test facilities.
“The reactor underpinning a nuclear thermal propulsion system is a significant technical challenge due to the very high operating temperatures needed to meet the propulsion performance goals,” explained Anthony Calomino, NASA’s nuclear technology portfolio lead within STMD.
While most of the engine operates at modest temperatures, materials in direct contact with the reactor fuel must be able to survive temperatures above 4,600 degrees Fahrenheit. NASA and DOE have been working with industry on a viable approach, and industry will now develop preliminary designs to meet this challenge.
Technology Infusion
“We’re exploring both nuclear electric and nuclear thermal propulsion options for crewed Mars missions,” Calomino said. “Each technology has its unique advantages and challenges that need to be carefully considered when determining the final preference.”
Whichever propulsion system is ultimately chosen, the fundamentals of nuclear propulsion can enable robust and efficient exploration beyond the Moon. NASA will continue to develop, test, and mature various propulsion technologies to reduce risk and inform the Mars transport architecture.
Source: NASA
https://stmdailynews.com/category/science/
Author
Discover more from Daily News
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
The Knowledge
Beneath the Waves: The Global Push to Build Undersea Railways
Undersea railways are transforming transportation, turning oceans from barriers into gateways. Proven by tunnels like the Channel and Seikan, these innovations offer cleaner, reliable connections for passengers and freight. Ongoing projects in China and Europe, alongside future proposals, signal a new era of global mobility beneath the waves.
For most of modern history, oceans have acted as natural barriers—dividing nations, slowing trade, and shaping how cities grow. But beneath the waves, a quiet transportation revolution is underway. Infrastructure once limited by geography is now being reimagined through undersea railways.
Undersea rail tunnels—like the Channel Tunnel and Japan’s Seikan Tunnel—proved decades ago that trains could reliably travel beneath the ocean floor. Today, new projects are expanding that vision even further.
Around the world, engineers and governments are investing in undersea railways—tunnels that allow high-speed trains to travel beneath oceans and seas. Once considered science fiction, these projects are now operational, under construction, or actively being planned.
Undersea Rail Is Already a Reality
Japan’s Seikan Tunnel and the Channel Tunnel between the United Kingdom and France proved decades ago that undersea railways are not only possible, but reliable. These tunnels carry passengers and freight beneath the sea every day, reshaping regional connectivity.
Undersea railways are cleaner than short-haul flights, more resilient than bridges, and capable of lasting more than a century. As climate pressures and congestion increase, rail beneath the sea is emerging as a practical solution for future mobility.
What’s Being Built Right Now
China is currently constructing the Jintang Undersea Railway Tunnel as part of the Ningbo–Zhoushan high-speed rail line, while Europe’s Fehmarnbelt Fixed Link will soon connect Denmark and Germany beneath the Baltic Sea. These projects highlight how transportation and technology are converging to solve modern mobility challenges.
The Mega-Projects Still on the Drawing Board
Looking ahead, proposals such as the Helsinki–Tallinn Tunnel and the long-studied Strait of Gibraltar rail tunnel could reshape global affairs by linking regions—and even continents—once separated by water.
Why Undersea Rail Matters
The future of transportation may not rise above the ocean—but run quietly beneath it.
Discover more from Daily News
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
child education
Special Education Is Turning to AI to Fill Staffing Gaps—But Privacy and Bias Risks Remain
With special education staffing shortages worsening, schools are using AI to draft IEPs, support training, and assist assessments. Experts warn the benefits come with major risks—privacy, bias, and trust.
Seth King, University of Iowa
In special education in the U.S., funding is scarce and personnel shortages are pervasive, leaving many school districts struggling to hire qualified and willing practitioners.
Amid these long-standing challenges, there is rising interest in using artificial intelligence tools to help close some of the gaps that districts currently face and lower labor costs.
Over 7 million children receive federally funded entitlements under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which guarantees students access to instruction tailored to their unique physical and psychological needs, as well as legal processes that allow families to negotiate support. Special education involves a range of professionals, including rehabilitation specialists, speech-language pathologists and classroom teaching assistants. But these specialists are in short supply, despite the proven need for their services.
As an associate professor in special education who works with AI, I see its potential and its pitfalls. While AI systems may be able to reduce administrative burdens, deliver expert guidance and help overwhelmed professionals manage their caseloads, they can also present ethical challenges – ranging from machine bias to broader issues of trust in automated systems. They also risk amplifying existing problems with how special ed services are delivered.
Yet some in the field are opting to test out AI tools, rather than waiting for a perfect solution.
A faster IEP, but how individualized?
AI is already shaping special education planning, personnel preparation and assessment.
One example is the individualized education program, or IEP, the primary instrument for guiding which services a child receives. An IEP draws on a range of assessments and other data to describe a child’s strengths, determine their needs and set measurable goals. Every part of this process depends on trained professionals.
But persistent workforce shortages mean districts often struggle to complete assessments, update plans and integrate input from parents. Most districts develop IEPs using software that requires practitioners to choose from a generalized set of rote responses or options, leading to a level of standardization that can fail to meet a child’s true individual needs.
Preliminary research has shown that large language models such as ChatGPT can be adept at generating key special education documents such as IEPs by drawing on multiple data sources, including information from students and families. Chatbots that can quickly craft IEPs could potentially help special education practitioners better meet the needs of individual children and their families. Some professional organizations in special education have even encouraged educators to use AI for documents such as lesson plans.
Training and diagnosing disabilities
There is also potential for AI systems to help support professional training and development. My own work on personnel development combines several AI applications with virtual reality to enable practitioners to rehearse instructional routines before working directly with children. Here, AI can function as a practical extension of existing training models, offering repeated practice and structured support in ways that are difficult to sustain with limited personnel.
Some districts have begun using AI for assessments, which can involve a range of academic, cognitive and medical evaluations. AI applications that pair automatic speech recognition and language processing are now being employed in computer-mediated oral reading assessments to score tests of student reading ability.
Practitioners often struggle to make sense of the volume of data that schools collect. AI-driven machine learning tools also can help here, by identifying patterns that may not be immediately visible to educators for evaluation or instructional decision-making. Such support may be especially useful in diagnosing disabilities such as autism or learning disabilities, where masking, variable presentation and incomplete histories can make interpretation difficult. My ongoing research shows that current AI can make predictions based on data likely to be available in some districts.
Privacy and trust concerns
There are serious ethical – and practical – questions about these AI-supported interventions, ranging from risks to students’ privacy to machine bias and deeper issues tied to family trust. Some hinge on the question of whether or not AI systems can deliver services that truly comply with existing law.
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act requires nondiscriminatory methods of evaluating disabilities to avoid inappropriately identifying students for services or neglecting to serve those who qualify. And the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act explicitly protects students’ data privacy and the rights of parents to access and hold their children’s data.
What happens if an AI system uses biased data or methods to generate a recommendation for a child? What if a child’s data is misused or leaked by an AI system? Using AI systems to perform some of the functions described above puts families in a position where they are expected to put their faith not only in their school district and its special education personnel, but also in commercial AI systems, the inner workings of which are largely inscrutable.
These ethical qualms are hardly unique to special ed; many have been raised in other fields and addressed by early-adopters. For example, while automatic speech recognition, or ASR, systems have struggled to accurately assess accented English, many vendors now train their systems to accommodate specific ethnic and regional accents.
But ongoing research work suggests that some ASR systems are limited in their capacity to accommodate speech differences associated with disabilities, account for classroom noise, and distinguish between different voices. While these issues may be addressed through technical improvement in the future, they are consequential at present.
Embedded bias
At first glance, machine learning models might appear to improve on traditional clinical decision-making. Yet AI models must be trained on existing data, meaning their decisions may continue to reflect long-standing biases in how disabilities have been identified.
Indeed, research has shown that AI systems are routinely hobbled by biases within both training data and system design. AI models can also introduce new biases, either by missing subtle information revealed during in-person evaluations or by overrepresenting characteristics of groups included in the training data.
Such concerns, defenders might argue, are addressed by safeguards already embedded in federal law. Families have considerable latitude in what they agree to, and can opt for alternatives, provided they are aware they can direct the IEP process.
By a similar token, using AI tools to build IEPs or lessons may seem like an obvious improvement over underdeveloped or perfunctory plans. Yet true individualization would require feeding protected data into large language models, which could violate privacy regulations. And while AI applications can readily produce better-looking IEPs and other paperwork, this does not necessarily result in improved services.
Filling the gap
Indeed, it is not yet clear whether AI provides a standard of care equivalent to the high-quality, conventional treatment to which children with disabilities are entitled under federal law.
The Supreme Court in 2017 rejected the notion that the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act merely entitles students to trivial, “de minimis” progress, which weakens one of the primary rationales for pursuing AI – that it can meet a minimum standard of care and practice. And since AI really has not been empirically evaluated at scale, it has not been proved that it adequately meets the low bar of simply improving beyond the flawed status quo.
But this does not change the reality of limited resources. For better or worse, AI is already being used to fill the gap between what the law requires and what the system actually provides.
Seth King, Associate Profess of Special Education, University of Iowa
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Discover more from Daily News
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
unknown
Fact Check: Did Mike Rogers Admit the Travis Walton UFO Case Was a Hoax?
A fact check of viral claims that Mike Rogers admitted the Travis Walton UFO case was a hoax. We examine the evidence, the spotlight theory, and what the record actually shows.
Last Updated on February 6, 2026 by Daily News Staff
In recent years, viral YouTube videos and podcast commentary have revived claims that the 1975 Travis Walton UFO abduction case was an admitted hoax. One of the most widely repeated allegations asserts that Mike Rogers, the logging crew’s foreman, supposedly confessed that he and Walton staged the entire event using a spotlight from a ranger tower to fool their coworkers.
So, is there any truth to this claim?
After reviewing decades of interviews, skeptical investigations, and public records, the answer is clear:
There is no verified evidence that Mike Rogers ever admitted the Travis Walton incident was a hoax.
Where the Viral Claim Comes From
The “confession” story has circulated for years in online forums and was recently amplified by commentary-style YouTube and podcast content, including popular personality-driven shows. These versions often claim:
Rogers and Walton planned the incident in advance
A spotlight from a ranger or observation tower simulated the UFO
The rest of the crew was unaware of the hoax
Rogers later “admitted” this publicly
However, none of these claims are supported by primary documentation.
What the Documented Record Shows
No Recorded Confession Exists
There is no audio, video, affidavit, court record, or signed statement in which Mike Rogers admits staging the incident.
Rogers has repeatedly denied hoax allegations in interviews spanning decades.
Even prominent skeptical organizations do not cite any confession by Rogers.
If such an admission existed, it would be widely referenced in skeptical literature and would have effectively closed the case. It has not.
The “Ranger Tower Spotlight” Theory Lacks Evidence
No confirmed ranger tower or spotlight installation matching the claim has been documented at the location.
No ranger, third party, or equipment operator has ever come forward.
No physical evidence or corroborating testimony supports this explanation.
Even professional skeptics typically label this idea as speculative, not factual.
Why Skepticism Still Exists (Legitimately)
While the viral claim lacks evidence, skepticism about the Walton case is not unfounded. Common, well-documented critiques include:
Financial pressure tied to a logging contract
The limitations and inconsistency of polygraph testing
Walton’s later use of hypnosis, which is controversial in memory recall
Possible cultural influence from 1970s UFO media
Importantly, none of these critiques rely on a confession by Mike Rogers, because none exists.
Updates & Current Status of the Case
As of today:
No new witnesses have come forward to confirm a hoax
No participant has recanted their core testimony
No physical evidence has conclusively proven or disproven the event
Walton and Rogers have both continued to deny hoax allegations
The case remains unresolved, not debunked.
Why Viral Misinformation Persists
Online commentary formats often compress nuance into dramatic statements. Over time:
Speculation becomes repeated as “fact”
Hypothetical explanations are presented as admissions
Entertainment content is mistaken for investigative reporting
This is especially common with long-standing mysteries like the Walton case, where ambiguity invites exaggeration.
Viral Claims vs. Verified Facts
Viral Claim:
Mike Rogers admitted he and Travis Walton staged the UFO incident.
Verified Fact:
No documented confession exists. Rogers has consistently denied hoax claims.
Viral Claim:
A ranger tower spotlight was used to fake the UFO.
Verified Fact:
No evidence confirms a tower, spotlight, or third-party involvement.
Viral Claim:
The case was “officially debunked.”
Verified Fact:
No authoritative body has conclusively debunked or confirmed the incident.
Viral Claim:
All skeptics agree it was a hoax.
Verified Fact:
Even skeptical researchers acknowledge the absence of definitive proof.
Viral Claim:
Hollywood exposed the truth in Fire in the Sky.
Verified Fact:
The film significantly fictionalized Walton’s testimony for dramatic effect.
Bottom Line
❌ There is no verified admission by Mike Rogers
❌ There is no evidence of a ranger tower spotlight hoax
✅ There are legitimate unanswered questions about the case
✅ The incident remains debated, not solved
The Travis Walton story persists not because it has been proven — but because it has never been conclusively explained.
Related External Reading
- Travis Walton UFO Incident – Wikipedia
- Travis Walton Interviews – Coast to Coast AM
- Fire in the Sky (1993) – IMDb
- MUFON – Mutual UFO Network Case Files
- NICAP – National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena
- Skeptical Inquirer – Scientific Analysis of Paranormal Claims
- U.S. National Archives – UFO & Government Records
Dive into “The Knowledge,” where curiosity meets clarity. This playlist, in collaboration with STMDailyNews.com, is designed for viewers who value historical accuracy and insightful learning. Our short videos, ranging from 30 seconds to a minute and a half, make complex subjects easy to grasp in no time. Covering everything from historical events to contemporary processes and entertainment, “The Knowledge” bridges the past with the present. In a world where information is abundant yet often misused, our series aims to guide you through the noise, preserving vital knowledge and truths that shape our lives today. Perfect for curious minds eager to discover the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of everything around us. Subscribe and join in as we explore the facts that matter. https://stmdailynews.com/the-knowledge/
Author
Discover more from Daily News
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
