[Appalled but Not Surprised]

ESA reports tests on DS4G produced an ion exhaust plume that travelled at 210,000 metres per second. >>

If they can get an exhaust plume that travelled at 186,000 miles per second, THEN we'll be getting somewhere!

[spinestein]

[Sutherland says laboratory tests show the DS4G it is four times more fuel efficient than the best ion engines available and 10 times more fuel efficient than used to propel ESA's SMART-1 Moon mission.]


As soon as they get that FluxCapacitor fluxing again then we'll really be in business.

[xcamel]

Looks like the legendary flux capacitor...

[Sam Cree]

ping

[KevinDavis]

[Luke Skyfreeper]

Sutherland says the ion engine needs megawatts of power to generate the necessary voltage across the electrodes and to generate the ion-providing plasma.

Marty: This is uh, this is heavy duty, Doc, this is great. Uh, does it run on regular unleaded gasoline?

Doc: Unfortunately, no! It requires something with a little more kick -- plutonium.

Marty: Uh? plutonium?? Wait a minute, are you telling me that this sucker is nuclear?!

Doc: Hey, hey, keep rolling, keep rolling there. No, no, no! This sucker's electrical. But I need a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity that I need.

Marty: Doc - you don't just walk into a store and ask for plutonium. Did you rip that off?

Doc: Of course! From a group of Libyan Nationalists. They wanted me to build them a bomb. So I took their plutonium and in turn gave them a shiny bomb case full of used pinball machine parts.

[Carl LaFong]

My '91 Toyota Previa gets 22 mpg!

[Brilliant]

A lot of hype on this engine.

[SunkenCiv]

On a Wing and a Jolt
by Ian Sample
New Scientist
December 9, 2000
original URL
new NS URL

The crucial thing, says Millis, is whether Goodwin's magnet would produce any net motion at all--it might just sit there and vibrate. "It's a definite possibility that any forces arising from Goodwin's concept will only act within the components of the device itself, resulting in no net force," he says. "There are a lot of unresolved physics issues to address."

[Bean Counter]

Why does this engine require a rare gas (xenon) to operate, instead of something more common, and readily available in space, like Hydrogen??

Bear with me if this is a really basic question, but I wasn't one of those people who excelled in High School Chemistry; in fact I got myself permanently booted from Chem Lab for (accidentally) setting it on fire.

[Paul Ross]

Bump. For later consideration.