Posted on 07/21/2006 5:16:40 PM PDT by KevinDavis
LIBERIA, Costa Rica (Reuters) - Better known for coffee, surfing and jungles, tiny tropical Costa Rica is now home to scientists working on a plasma rocket engine they hope will slash travel times to the moon and beyond.
Led by Costa Rican-born former NASA space shuttle astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz, the Houston-based Ad Astra Rocket Company inaugurated a site last weekend in the Central American nation to test rocket components.
The company hopes to sell the finished rocket engine, propelled by super-hot plasma, to NASA for moon trips planned for the next decade and an eventual lunar space station.
Scientists believe rockets that run on plasma, the stuff that makes stars shine, will be faster than rockets currently used in space travel.
(Excerpt) Read more at today.reuters.com ...
oh, gimme a f[beep!]ing break!
I hear the Red Cross needs plasma... ;')
oh, gimme a f[beep!]ing break!
The trick is to get the plasma engine into orbit
that wasn't what I was complaining about.
there's plasma, and then there's plasma.
I *sincerely* doubt the engine replicates the conditions of a stellar core.
I googled 'Vasimir', and came out with this,The development of the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR) was initiated in the late 1970s to address a critical requirement for fast, high-power interplanetary space transportation. Its high-power and electrodeless design arises from the use of radio frequency (RF) waves to create and accelerate plasma in a magnetic nozzle. While not being a fusion rocket, it nevertheless borrows heavily from that technology and takes advantage of the natural topology of open-ended magnetic systems." This would seem to indicate a plasma of ionized hydrogen or helium. The authors of the paper I've just quoted, Chang Diaz, F.R.; Squire, J.P.; Glover et al, admit that this is not quite close to fusion conditions. It may have been a leap by the reporter of the original article to assume so.
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