The quickest way to recognize how rad Earth is, is to leave it. Every time we send a spacecraft into space, we have to send it with everything it will ever need riding on its back or in its belly.

After a 27-year gap, the U.S. Department of Energy has resumed producing plutonium-238, the radioactive fuel that powers NASA’s Curiosity rover on Mars and the New Horizons mission to Pluto and beyond ...

NASA’s worries about running out of plutonium by the middle of the next decade are premature, according to a senior U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) official. The U.S. space agency has three missions ...

Voyages into space are among the most iconic endeavors of the 20th and 21st centuries. Spacecraft that have ventured out to this “final frontier” have relayed stunning images and enlightening ...

WASHINGTON — Ever since 2013, when NASA shelved development of a new plutonium battery four times more efficient than those used today, the agency has been forced to come up with creative solutions ...

Radioactive materials have enormous potential as a source of energy, but some isotopes are available in such small quantities that their use as an energy source is limited. In the 1950s, scientists at ...

I recall a Poul Anderson science fiction novel with teleportation being one of its’ premises and one of the plot points was the main station was on the Moon because you could teleport millions of tons ...

The United States has begun manufacturing nuclear spacecraft fuel for the first time in a generation, but full production of the stuff is still seven years or so away. In December, officials at the ...

The US government says a new robot is poised to help it create a reliable, long-term supply chain of plutonium-238, a radioactive material NASA requires to explore deep space. NASA uses Pu-238 to ...

In the next two or three years, the U.S. Department of Energy will begin producing small quantities of a material known as plutonium-238 at refurbished federal nuclear facilities in Idaho and ...

Scientists have produced a powder of plutonium-238 for the first time in nearly 30 years in the United States, a milestone that they say sets the country on a path toward powering NASA's deep-space ...

· Plutonium in its pure form is a radioactive material about twice as dense as lead. Essentially all the plutonium on the planet is man-made, created over the last six decades through fissionable ...