The top official at the United States space agency NASA has said the country plans to test a spacecraft engine powered with nuclear fission by 2027, an advancement seen as key to long-haul missions including a manned journey to Mars. NASA will partner with the US military's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop the nuclear thermal propulsion engine and launch it into space, NASA administrator Bill Nelson said on Tuesday. The project has been named the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations or DRACO. "With the help of this new technology, astronauts could journey to and from deep space faster than ever – a major capability to prepare for crewed missions to Mars," Nelson said in a statement. The announcement comes amid a new nuclear space race between the US, Russia and China, with the three superpowers working to expand their extraterrestrial nuclear capabilities, including for use propelling spacecraft and powering colonies on the moon.

How did you become interested in artificial intelligence (AI)? I am a documentary filmmaker, writer and speaker. I was making a film around 15 years ago about AI and got to speak to some of the major players in the field, including Ray Kurzweil, the Director of Engineering at Google who started the singularity industry, and Rodney Brookes, the premier roboticist of our time who founded iRobot (a company that created the Roomba vaccum cleaner and robots for military use) and then established a company called Rethink Robotics. Both Kurzweil and Brookes were optimistic about the time when we will share the planet with smarter-than-human machines – and I was too. I was, and still am, a gigantic proponent of AI, despite my book's title Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era.