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VASIMR plasma rocket goes commercial
Jan. 27, 2006: NASA announced that it had signed an agreement with Ad Astra Rocket Co. which paves the way for commercialization of VASIMR; an electric engine particularly suited for use with nuclear power sources including pebble bed nuclear reactors (small, safe & cheap). Think of it as ION drive on steroids.
You compare rockets using 'specific impulse'; SI. More is better, not in terms of absolute thrust but power over time.
Solid or liquid rockets deliver lot's of absolute thrust but only for a few minutes, so their SI runs ~100-400. Because it can deliver a smaller thrust for weeks, months or even years at a time VASIMR's SI can be >30,000.
VASIMR: type of helicon thruster that has been under development by a NASA astronaut for more than two decades. Astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz, a veteran of seven Space Shuttle flights, began work on the rocket technology in 1979, when he was a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since late 1993 Chang-Diaz and colleagues have continued work on the engine, first at the Advanced Space Propulsion Laboratory at the Johnson Space Center and more recently with Houston-based Ad Astra Rocket Company.
By firing continuously, accelerating during the first half of the flight then turning to deaccelerate the spacecraft for the second half, VASIMR could send human spacecraft to Mars in just over three months. In addition, VASIMR could permit such a mission to abort to Earth if problems developed during the early phases of the mission, a capability not available to conventional engines.
MORE: http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=18828
You compare rockets using 'specific impulse'; SI. More is better, not in terms of absolute thrust but power over time.
Solid or liquid rockets deliver lot's of absolute thrust but only for a few minutes, so their SI runs ~100-400. Because it can deliver a smaller thrust for weeks, months or even years at a time VASIMR's SI can be >30,000.
VASIMR: type of helicon thruster that has been under development by a NASA astronaut for more than two decades. Astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz, a veteran of seven Space Shuttle flights, began work on the rocket technology in 1979, when he was a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since late 1993 Chang-Diaz and colleagues have continued work on the engine, first at the Advanced Space Propulsion Laboratory at the Johnson Space Center and more recently with Houston-based Ad Astra Rocket Company.
By firing continuously, accelerating during the first half of the flight then turning to deaccelerate the spacecraft for the second half, VASIMR could send human spacecraft to Mars in just over three months. In addition, VASIMR could permit such a mission to abort to Earth if problems developed during the early phases of the mission, a capability not available to conventional engines.
MORE: http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=18828