[fiscally_right]

At 80000 meters/second? Pretty damn fast. A few weeks maybe? I think mars is like 56,000,000 km away when its orbit is right.

(56,000,000,000 m)*(1 second/80000 m)*(1 day/86400 seconds) = 8.101 days.

Is that right? That doesn't seem possible.. Of course it would be a little more than that since it isn't really a straight shot to mars.. But that's still insane.

[fiscally_right]

Oh, not to mention it would take a long time to build up that much speed.. and how exactly do you hit the brakes when you're going 80 km/s?

[Bogey78O]

Well from what I understand the shortest path to mars would take almost a year. It's a shame we aren't 20 years ahead. I imagine we were awfully close recently.

[Brett66]

This propulsion system is relatively weak but highly efficient. With a properly designed ship, it could be possible to reduce travel times to Mars to about half of what a standard chemical rocket could do. The real benefit would be weight, you could make a spacecraft that uses 1/20th the propellant to get to Mars in half the time.

Unfortunately we would need an ion drive with a lot more "oomph" to make it a practical system for taking humans to Mars. It has the efficiency, but the thrust just isn't what we need for such a mission. But even with this current system we could get sizable advantages over current chemical propulsion systems. In fact I would say that this system, even in it's current state, would make any plans of using conventional chemical propulsion to get to Mars fairly obsolete.

[Junior]

The ions are traveling at 80 km/s, not the spacecraft.