British Company Signs Commercial Agreement for Chang's Plasma Rocket

10kBq Jaro · Senior Member

British Company Signs Commercial Agreement for Chang's Plasma Rocket

John · Senior Member

The fact that NASA isn't behind this 100% just shows how lame they really are!

GoogleNaut · Guru

Well, I don't know about that...

The fact that the US Congress is only increasing NASA's budget by something less than 1% while at the same time holding them to the deadlines associated Project Orion pretty much ensures that NASA is out of the anything else-but Moon business...

which is a real shame...

because there are a lot of other very worthy projects out there too--and the reality is that we need to do both manned deep space missions, and near term, near-Earth propulsion experiments, especially if we intend to have any kind of meaningful human presence in the Solar System..

The US has the capability to lead, and have plenty of room for other countries to follow and contribute--if the US leadership (and by defacto--the citizens of the US) value this enough to demand their representatives to support this...

And it takes real leadership to recognize the value of things like Dr. Franklin Ramon Chang-Diaz's VASIMR engine...and we just don't have that.

A well educated president, with the respect and admiration of congress and the people, who is willing and brave enough to take a leadership stance on technology and take a chance on a risky enterprise like space exploration--just might have the ability to turn things around...

Unfortunately we don't have any of those--so we are stuck with a 'lame duck' leadership, and a program that just has to make do with what its got...

-- Edited by GoogleNaut at 05:26, 2007-09-18

NUKE ROCKY44 · Senior Member

Yeah... but ad Astra/VASIMR to be fair, has to show 'industrial strength' deltaV longer than 4-6 hours at 'top end' Isp thrust production for any serious mass transport. I'm sure clients will want assurances before hard cash is exchanged.

I hope ad Astra/VASIMR can continue to modify their system, I think it has real potential, but in the aerospace biz they tend to play "hardball".

John · Senior Member

I'm not going to let them off that easy. I bet it wouldn't be that hard to find something to cut in order to divert some money to VASIMR. I'd cut some global warming research. furious

Given the limited resources commited to date it would be surprising that we don't have any better results. I think Congress and our brain dead media are more at fault than the administration. Basically this isn't an age of inspired leadership.

By the way want happens to the current VASIMR device after 4 to 6 hours?

NUKE ROCKY44 · Senior Member

want happens to the current VASIMR device after 4 to 6 hours?Good question...Don't know, guess it loses thrust caused by any number of causes:RF booster source excessive heat, coolant problems, plasma source material problem, SC magnetic coil shutdown, excessive fuel consumption.

It would be interesting to ask ad Astra about VASIMR.

-- Edited by NUKE ROCKY44 at 02:44, 2007-09-19

-- Edited by NUKE ROCKY44 at 22:04, 2007-09-19

GoogleNaut · Guru

I have actually talked written to Dr. Chang-Diaz about a couple of things--and right now they are still working on the erosion problem: some of the plasma still comes into contact with the helicon rf-excitation antenna and some of the inner walls of the quartz tube--the interactions with plasma quenching--and atomic (single atoms) hydrogen interactions is chemically quite reactive--so erosion may be part of the problem...

I think what they are proposing is a first generation, solar powered high-performance upper stage for satellite apogee boosting, orbit circulartization, and station keeping. After the propellant is nearly spent, I would imagine the VASIMR 'upper stage' would uncouple from payload and fly on to a 'disposal orbit' above the geosynchronous orbit position...

This seems to be about the industry standard practice these days--because it preserves the valuable 'realestate' at geosynchronous positions...

NUKE ROCKY44 · Senior Member

Haven't they always had Helicon erosion problems with previous VASIMR versions?

I've always known IP units, PIT, Hall thrusters etc. to operate for months at a time.

Erosion, pitting, scouring of material is part of engineering headaches in electrical propulsion units for space propulsion. Others have been successful at some level of mitigating the problem.

GoogleNaut · Guru

It was my suggestion to Mr. Diaz to place a barrier like fused silica sleeve or sheath between the helicons and the plasma stream. It then becomes possible to introduce a small amount of shield gas between the plasma and the helicon--by injecting the gas downstream of the Electron-Cyclotron plasma generator coil (which causes injected gas to 'break down' to a relatively cool plasma) and the ion-cyclotron radio frequency heating coil (the plasma 'afterburner' if you will), it becomes possible to create a gas dynamic shield between the coil, fused siliza, and the plasma. This will affect the Isp of course, but it may be possible to protect the coil to increase its life...

Interestingly enough, it is possible to create things called virtual 'cathodes' in plasmas by projecting the electrostatic 'image' of a cathode onto the surface of a plasma. Conceivably something similar to this might be possible using a--for want of a better term--a holographic projection technique to dynamically 'induce' the 'image' of an rf-coil around the plasma--I unfortunately don't know enough about rf or plasma physics but it might be possible...