Eli5: How does nuclear submarine/space rockets works? Could this be use for interplanetary travel?
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Yes, there have been concepts and practical applications of nuclear fission powering rockets.
In a submarine you have a small nuclear reactor creating a lot of electricity to power the submarine, including creating oxygen and powering the electric motors.
For rockets, power is very important and the sun isn’t always a reliable provider through panels. So there are RTGs, essentially very small nuclear reactors, that produce a constant small amount of power. Rovers or the Voyager probes are powered by these.
To propel rockets with nuclear power there are multiple concepts. The most ridiculous one was the Orion project, which wanted to detonate nuclear bombs to shoot rockets forward. This was scrapped for obvious reasons.
The more practical approach are nuclear thermal rockets, where nuclear fission heats up gas in a chamber, similar to water in a nuclear reactor, but instead of letting the steam power a turbine, the gas then gets released to push the rocket forward.
Unfortunately, this still needs a good chunk of highly radioactive material, which could get dispersed during a failure.
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