Historic 1960s Film Describes Project Rover

Between 1955 and 1973, the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory designed and built nuclear reactors for rocket engines intended to carry astronauts far beyond the moon. The Rover Program, as it was known, successfully produced three reactors suitable for flight testing, including the Phoebus-2A: the most powerful individual reactor of any type ever built and tested. Unfortunately, the proposed mission to Mars was cancelled in the early 70s and the Rover Program along with it. Still, the Rover Program changed history. This year marks the 50th anniversary of two key hot-fire tests with demonstrated thrusts twice as high as any chemical rocket engine: Phoebus-2A in June 1968, with nearly 5000 MW of thermal power, and Pewee 1 in December 1968, a compact version at 500 MW. Each engine demonstrated a specific impulse using liquid hydrogen as a fuel of over 800 s. Today, NASA has a modern nuclear thermal propulsion project based on the Pewee design, which remains the best hope of getting people quickly to, and back from, Mars.

This short movie, Beyond the Moon, tells the story of this forgotten but amazing program from the perspective of the mid-1960s, when the quest to put a person on Mars seemed to be just a few years away.