Using what I know now, the technologies I am certain I can get to work, I can make a nuclear powered shuttlecraft which can take off from Earth and go any place in the solar system. It isn't hard - lots of people could make a molten salt reactor, an electric jet plane engine with a resistance element for heating the airstream. The VASIMR engine is just one example of an ion engine, which can reach ISPs in the tens of thousands and run for thousands of hours constantly. It is just no one has put the elements together.
But it gets BETTER.
Because If I use a pure fissile seed, like Pu239, U235 or U233 (weapons grade) and add it to Thorium - I can make a compact breed even reactor. Which gives me decades of run time. Decades of power + ISP 20,000+ gives you Alpha Centauri in decades.
The human race has the technology TODAY to reach other stars, and come back.
I would love to be the man to do it - knowing the other nuclear engineers I have met, I am likely the only living nuclear engineer who could. Not to knock them, but nuclear engineers use active systems to control, and do not understand the principle of simplicity. For a reactor which will run for decades uninterrupted at high power, you NEED to have it be simple, with literally no wear parts, no maintenance to schedule, nothing but start it and get power out.
I am going to go run a simulation of the core I show here at 1 GW for a century - 365,000 days, starting with a sufficient fuel load to be able to do that (since that is 380 tons of fission products, the system would need at least that much fuel). I might as well seed with U233 for the best performance.
If you wish to support my efforts, find a place where I can build a test reactor. Even a 1 MW research and isotope reactor would be a huge step. Cost for that would be less than $5 Million, including fuel, but excluding licensing.
