Foraging for Nuclear Rocket Secrets

I spent this past Thursday at the National Archives in Chicago as one of the few humans in the last three decades to track down the project files for the Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Applications (NERVA) Program from the 1960s. The experience of using the National Archive was exactly like and completely unlike what I’d […]

Getting up to speed, part 2. (Space update)

Halfway into the 21-st Century aughts, I landed a job as a scientist in the Environmental Restoration program at the Nevada Test Site. This amounted to the study, clean-up, and documentation of contamination left over from the glory days of above-ground nuclear weapon tests. I wanted fieldwork that other astronaut-hopefuls wouldn’t be getting, and boy […]