Successful Test of Superconducting Plasma Rocket Engine 168
xp65 writes to mention that Ad Astra has successfully tested their VX-200 plasma engine at full power in superconducting conditions, the first time such an engine has been tested at those power levels. "The VX-200 engine is the first flight-like prototype of the VASIMR® propulsion system, a new high-power plasma-based rocket, initially studied by NASA and now being developed privately by Ad Astra. VASIMR® engines could enable space operations far more efficiently than today's chemical rockets and ultimately they could also greatly speed up robotic and human transit times for missions to Mars and beyond."
Re:High Thrust, High Specific Impulse (Isp) (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Total power (Score:5, Insightful)
Correct. While it's theoretically possible to use engines like this as part of a liftoff stack (assuming enough engines, low enough weight per engine, and a high enough power budget), it's not really practical to consider such a concept at this time. For the short term at least, LEO access will remain the purview of chemical rockets.
Re:High Thrust, High Specific Impulse (Isp) (Score:5, Insightful)
THIS is why we need to go to the Moon and Mars and beyond... it is only through pushing through the boundaries to the unknown that we advance as a species. Otherwise, all we do is sit in self-induced stagnation endlessly trying to perfect ourselves.
I agree, but this is going to be the tough sell over the next 30 years. I know where I work I am drowning a deluge of people who never crack a book, have no curiosity beyond what will happen on the next American Idol, and have no deep thoughts about anything.
Vonnegut (and many others) seem to be right and we seem to be devolving. Endeavours in space and science is how we move forward, but there are less and less people that are interested in anything beyond where they are going to eat tonight. Fighting shallow mindedness is the REAL struggle.
Re:200 kW (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:High Thrust, High Specific Impulse (Isp) (Score:2, Insightful)
I so agree with you, one thing to add, right now it's more important to "sound" like you know what your talking about than actually knowing. I also wonder if it isn't because of affluence that most of society in G8 countries tend to be complacent or afraid to loose what they have.
Re:High Thrust, High Specific Impulse (Isp) (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't get me wrong, fighting shallow mindedness is TOTALLY necessary, but it has always been. There has been no "golden age" where everybody was open-minded and well-educated.
Re:High Thrust, High Specific Impulse (Isp) (Score:3, Insightful)
I so agree with you, one thing to add, right now it's more important to "sound" like you know what your talking about than actually knowing.
[citation needed]...
power sources - hither and yon (Score:5, Insightful)
It doesn't matter too much how efficient a power source is, as long as the fuel is plentiful. For instance, if you have a REAL LOT of petrochemicals it doesn't really matter how much you have to use to get to mars, etc. BUT more important is how DENSE the energy source is...i.e, how much more of the fuel does it take to move the fuel that is going to be used later on. This gets to be a BIG PROBLEM with chemical fuels, as even at their best they are not very DENSE. Of course, efficiency helps. But say, for a moment, that you have a nice large nuclear power plant on earth...you could probably use all that heat to either directly or indirectly (though electricity) create some high-density chemical fuels...but there's a limit to how much power a chemical fuel can provide. We need NUCLEAR FUEL, be it fission or fusion, or even better ANTIMATTER fuel. While some people claim that nuclear fuel is too dangerous to use on earth, I disagree. But I do think that antimatter is too dangerous to be used anywhere in the vicinity of important and/or massive objects (can't have the earth or space station pummeled by shrapnel in the case of an antimatter explosion, can we? And remember, there's no air friction to slow this shrapnel down). So, the best advice is to use fission, or hopefully fusion once technology gives up on the silly Tokamak idea, to leave earth's gravity well and move far enough out of the plane to be safe, and then use antimatter to the long haul. What, you say antimatter is too expensive? That's only because you've picked the wrong places to manufacture it. Production using solar power in CLOSE SOLAR ORBIT, in a thousand factories, should make antimatter cheap enough. You just have to go fetch it from close-solar orbits, which can be robotically done using the antimatter as fuel itself! The factories themselves can be replicaed using easily available materials from the moon or asteroids, and then replicated in close solar orbit using the vast energy resouces of the sun.
So to sum up, the problem isn't the amount of energy required, but the location of that energy. Move our energy conversion devices closer to the source, and we'll have plnety of consumable energy, even if it has to go through several intermediate storage mechanisms to become safe and easily accessible.
And yes, I've said this in other places, over time. I just hope that I get through to someone who is charged with long-term planning for space exploration.