NASA Plans Test of New Plasma Drive

Sallust writes "Flightglobal has an interesting article about the testing of a new electrically powered plasma engine called the Vasimir. It's being developed by former astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz and promises to greatly reduce the time and fuel required for interplanetary journeys. According to the article: 'The Vasimir involves the injection of a gas such as hydrogen into an engine that turns it into a plasma. That plasma is then energised further using radio signals as it flows through the engine, a process controlled by electromagnetic waves from superconducting magnets. Accelerated and heated through this process the plasma is focused and directed as exhaust by a magnetic nozzle. Vasimir is many times more efficient than conventional chemical rockets and far less fuel is needed.' The developers are finalising an agreement with NASA to fit a scaled-down version of the engine to the ISS to conduct operational tests. There is also a concept video on YouTube suggesting a journey time for a manned craft to Mars on the order of 60-70 days."

Makes me happy

[SSIlver2002]

It's stuff like this that makes me happy and brings a huge smile to my face. It also makes my imagination go wild! I hope something like this gets implemented sooner than later.

But the radio signals

[Anonymous Coward]

...have to be playing Magic Carpet Ride

Re:Yes, attach it to the ISS

[freddy_dreddy]

I think the point here is to exploit the recent discovery of water on Mars. With conventional fuels you have to take the return-charge with you. Concepts like these allow them to harvest Hydrogen on Mars for the return trip, which is pretty useful. The painful detail (apart from the complexity) is the mechanism for braking - you're f*d if that fails.

Re:that's all good, but..

[oldspewey]

I wonder, aggregate across the internet - how much storage, energy, and bandwidth is wasted by pointless memes?

... and on the day that the internet crosses some critical threshold in computing and storage capacity and actually becomes a self-aware entity, will it be really annoying?

Re:Engine?

[toby34a]

It will be interesting. However, we've known for a long time that a nuclear reactor would be the best fuel source for a space vessel. Truth be told, it's probably safer to put a nuclear reactor in a spacecraft then in a submarine or aircraft carrier, and the Navy does that all of the time (and it would be more environmental... out in space, you wouldn't have the radioactivity in the oceans). Considering most sub reactors get >100 MW, 200 kW isn't a big deal, and you can power the ship off of it too.

Re:All they have to do now...

[lgw]

You can only put so much current through a busbar. What do you do when a solid copper bar 4 inches across won't carry the power you need? Eventually the size and mass of the busbar required make scaling up in power impractical. For drives, weapons, computer cores, and the like it makes sense.

Of course, that doesn't explain why the bridge consoles exploded regularly - that's just lowest-bidder construction.