This has been under development since the 70’s, it’s hardly a new technology.
I’m glad to hear Franklin Chang Diaz has went into the commercial field though, they should be able to get these working as positioning thrusters for satellites.
This propulsion is like anything else, they COULD do a lot with it - if they had a MW class nuclear reactor to power it.
Since that’s a political barrier instead of a technical one, I don’t suspect we’ll progress past where we went in the 60’s with that idea, but a lower powered solar version may actually get used in space.
More along the lines of needing a significant fraction of a gigawatt power source - Redundancy for manned flight generally would suggest that there'd be three 200 megawatt plasma engines on board, whereas the International Space Station, our most advanced power source in space, generates merely .126 megawatts.