Top officials in the Russian Federation announced on Thursday that they gave their acceptance to a proposal stating that the country should pursue the development of a nuclear-powered spacecraft, which is currently set to fly as early as 2012. This would essentially leave the former Communist nation in charge of the nuclear space race, as the United States continue to lose their role as the dominating force in space today. According to Russian scientists, building the new spacecraft could cost as much as $600 million, Wired reports.

“The idea [of nuclear-powered spaceflight] has bright prospects, and if Russia could stage a breakthrough it could become our main contribution to any future international program of deep space exploration,” independent, Moscow-based space expert Andrei Ionin told the Christian Science Monitor newspaper. The Co-director of the University of New Mexico (UNM) Institute for Space and Nuclear Power Studies, nuclear engineer Patrick McDaniel, says that the idea is definitely feasible, but that there are numerous obstacles still to be tackled.

McDaniel believes that the idea, although feasible, cannot be applied within the short time frame that the Russians have established for themselves. Other experts highlight the fact that numerous other spacecraft that were developed relatively fast also need much more time than the two years the Russians believe it would take their experts to solve everything. “To have a test article that they could test on the ground, that’s very reasonable. To have a completed system, that’s highly unlikely,” the expert adds. The original idea of taking nuclear ideas to orbit started with a North American Aviation report to the US Air Force (USAF), in 1947.

“We could have done a lot more things in space. We could have gone more places. It’s highly likely we would have gone to Mars,” McDaniel says of the possibilities that we might have explored if nuclear power in space had been a concept more actively pursued in the past five decades. Now, it's too late in either case, with all that time wasted. Additionally, NASA, for example, selects its propulsion systems based entirely on its destinations, and does not create such systems for hypothetical destinations. “Until we commit to going back to Mars, we’re not going to have a nuclear rocket,” McDaniel concludes.