Rolls-Royce has announced that it is developing a micro-sized nuclear reactor that it hopes will be used for mining operations on the Moon and eventually Mars, according to The Mail on Sunday.

Dave Gordon, head of the company’s defence division, said that there is a huge shortage of rare earth metals on Earth that can instead be found on other planets and the Moon.

The company is also studying how a micro-nuclear reactor could also be used to propel rockets while in space at ultra-fast speeds. Currently it is estimated that it would take astronauts at least nine months to reach Mars.

There are numerous problems with this ranging from protecting the crew from harmful radiation for that amount of time, to taking enough food and water for the trip both there and back. However, by using a nuclear reactor to propel the craft, the journey could be cut down to only three months.

Gordon said that’s Rolls-Royce is the only company on Earth that does mechanical, electrical, and nuclear and a full end-to-end lifecycle of nuclear capability. He also noted that the firm could use its experience in developing nuclear-powered submarines for the Royal Navy for 60 years to apply what it learned to spacecraft since submarines and spacecraft are somewhat similar. 

That said, other companies and countries are also looking into either mining the Moon or asteroids.

The idea of using nuclear power in some form to power a space craft is not a new idea. In the 1950s and 1960s, the US Air Force, NASA, and the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency looked into using nuclear bombs to power a craft. Called Project Orion, the ship would actually explode nuclear bombs directly behind it. Some scientists believed that this would propel the ship forward at nearly the speed of light and would be the only practical way humans would ever leave our solar system.

However, the US signing of the Partial Test Ban Treaty which banned nuclear explosions in space put an end to this programme.