Democritos: preparing demonstrators for high power nuclear electric space propulsion

The Democritos project aims at preparing demonstrators for a megawatt class nuclearelectric space propulsion. It is funded by Horizon 2020, the R&T program of the European Community. It is a new European and Russian project, including as partners: Nuclear National Laboratory (U.K.), DLR (Germany), The Keldysh Research Center (Russia), Thales Alenia Space Italia (Italy), Snecma (France), ESF (France) and CNES (France). IEAV (Brazil) will join as an observer. Democritos is the follow-up of the Megahit project (www.megahit-eu.org). During Megahit project, a reference architecture was established for 1MWe nuclear electric propulsion INPPS (International Nuclear Propulsion and Power System) , and a roadmap was proposed to have a spacecraft available by the early 30's. The main aim of Democritos is to start implementing the Megahit roadmaps by preparing demonstrators for some of the necessary technologies. Democritos features a technical part, with preliminary design of the demonstrators and their test benches. It features also a programmatic part, which will deal with financial and organizational aspects of such an endeavour: the ambition of the project is to initiate or join international cooperations, as broad as possible, which will lead to the implementation of the demonstrators.