The future is in yours hands. Whether it’s the AI Chatbot on your phone, the battery in your car, or the e-bike beneath your seat, the most disruptive technologies — the innovations that will shape the future — are already here. Explore Inverse’s September tech issue below.

In 2025, if all goes according to plan, NASA will launch the first-ever nuclear fission-powered rocket into space.

The Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO) won’t go very far. It will only reach an orbit above Earth, the distance of most satellites. But if DRACO is successful, its successors could set out for Mars or the outer solar system. Nuclear fission can reach Mars or the outer solar system far more quickly and efficiently than today’s rockets. In fact, nuclear fission might be the only way humans ever make it to the Red Planet.

“The final goal is to get to Mars,” Fatima Ebrahimi, a physicist at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, tells Inverse. “You really need nuclear for that.”