By 
Artist’s illustration of nuclear reactor on a moon base powered by Rolls-Royce microreactors. (Image credit: Rolls-Royce Holdings)
Rolls-Royce is functioning on a nuclear reactor for providing power to mining operations on the Moon and even Mars, The Mail on Sunday reported. The firm issued a collective research into nuclear power choice for space rockets with the UK Space Agency at the beginning of the year.
The firm is seeking how a micro-nuclear reactor could be utilized to drive rockets while in space at great speeds and how that technology could then be relocate to give power for drilling, processing, and storage for “Moon mining” and possibly “Mars mining.”
Dave Gordon, head of the company’s defense division, said this work is viable credits to Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and their respective space companies.
He mentioned that’s Rolls-Royce is the one and only company on the planet that does mechanical, electrical, and nuclear and a full end-to-end lifecycle of nuclear capability. He also mentioned that the firm could utilize its knowledge in making nuclear-powered submarines for the Royal Navy for 60 years to make it applicable what it practiced to spacecraft since submarines and spacecraft are likely.
Both are “non-air breathing environments, long endurance, super reliable with a opaque power source.”
Gordon finally focused that there is a lack of unique earth metals on Earth that can instead be available on other planets and the moon. That’s why he thinks optimistically that Moon mining and Mars mining will take place in his lifetime.
These new activities, claims Gordon, will have to be fueled by nuclear as solar is not a choice at those spaces. Rolls-Royce is not alone to have such optimistic objectives.
Three companies, along with Lunar Outpost, Honeybee Robotics, and Masten Space Systems, are making a novel system objectives at mining water ice from the moon with rockets. They desire to fulfil their goal by 2023.
Along wit this, a group of scientists from the University of Arizona got $500,000 grant from NASA to make space-mining methods. What they are evolving is a swarm of autonomous robots that could find and mine for different earth metals on the Moon.
It has also believed that the first trillionaire of the world will be the ones who make their fate in asteroid mining. This prediction has been done by people like famed futurist Peter Diamandis, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, and financial firm Goldmann Sachs.
