Eli5: How does nuclear submarine/space rockets works? Could this be use for interplanetary travel?
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There have been some spacecraft with fullblown nuclear reactors, as well as many that use an RTG, which generates electricity from the heat produced by radioactive decay (you can think of these as being a bit like a “nuclear battery”). It’s usually more straightforward to use solar panels to keep spacecraft powered though. For long-distance travel, a particularly promising idea is the “solar sail”, a large, lightweight structure facing the Sun – the spacecraft would be propelled by the force of sunlight hitting the sail.
> Could this be use for interplanetary travel?
Interplanetary travel is just very, very hard. There have been several extremely tentative proposals to send an unmanned spacecraft to do a flyby of Proxima Centauri, the nearest solar system. But it would take many decades to get there, and the risk of something going wrong over that length of time is very high. It’s also not really clear how interesting the results would be – especially since by the time the probe arrives, there will probably have been all kinds of developments in telescopes and theoretical modelling and we might already have learned many of the things it can tell us.
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