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Ex-Astronaut Developing Plasma Rocket To Revitalize NASA
TechReviewAl writes "Former astronaut Franklin Chang Diaz believes that the private sector can revitalize NASA, and his company is developing a plasma rocket to back up that claim. Chang Diaz argues that private industry can be used to develop much of the basic technology needed for space exploration, allowing NASA to focus on more sophisticated and critical components. His company, Ad Astra, is developing a variable specific impulse magnetoplasma rocket (VASIMR) that will be used to reposition the International Space Station. Last week, the rocket passed an important milestone in testing — reaching 200 kilowatts (enough to move the ISS). A video of the rocket can be seen on Ad Astra's site."
Bonus points for the space invaders noises it apparently makes.
There, I hope that making more sense.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
Since the ISS only has 120-130 Kilowatts of Solar Panels, running a 200 Kilowatt motor would be difficult.
Also Kilowatts though stated in the article aren't really a measure of thrust.
The engine can operate at different levels UP TO 200 kW, but would probably have to use about half that because of the stations limitations. Though if the Motor can use waste hydrogen from the Fuel Cells/Ox Generators they are estimating it would save NASA bringing up fuel for reboosts. (From the Proposal/white paper on VASIMR)
AFAIK they have been working on VASIMR for over a decade now... This isn't exactly "news"
I've been building this big ol' rocket in my barn, here in Texas. If I could just get the feds off my back long enough to fuel the thing, I'd be happy to help out.
If you measure distance in terms of transit times, the sustainable thrust potential of this technology would make the Solar System the same size to travelers as the Earth was during the Age of Sail.
NASA really needs to move to a research and incubation role, similar to what it does in the aeronautical world. Given the constant changes in direction each new administration brings, and the whims of budgeting each new congress brings, NASA can't continue to be the primary source for launch vehicles.
They should license out the Ares technology, promote competitions among the multiple private rocket vendors and focus on scientific and development missions using private vendors to provide the launch capacity.
VASIMR means the only expensive part is getting to LEO. Once there, a space tug using VASIMR can lift satellites to GEO for almost nothing (compared to today's prices). It's not really fast enough for human travel, but for moving equipment around Earth orbit (or elsewhere), it's very promising. Between this and SpaceX reducing the price to LEO, the next 10 years should be very exciting in commercial space travel.
Not a typewriter
A cynical view I know. But the US Gov pays through the nose to train these guys who then just retire and try to cash in on the Washington gravy train. Just like the rest of the high level military, political and bureaucratic employees that leave gov employment in order to cash in. Typical and sad.
Why is that "sad"? Would you keep working for the Government if you had a skillset that was going to enable you to make a lot more money in the private sector? Does it also bother you when someone gets an entry level IT job and then leaves for greener pastures once they acquire sufficient work experience?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Or maybe, just maybe, the guy got a doctorate in plasma physics, and flew 7 Space Shuttle missions (which isn't exactly safe), directed the NASA Advanced Space Propulsion Laboratory, and is investing in plasma rocket research after his NASA tenure because he's interested in plasma physics, rocket science, and the possibilities of space flight.
I am officially gone from
Can't any amount of power move the ISS just at a slower rate?
But the US Gov pays through the nose to train these guys who then just retire and try to cash in on the Washington gravy train.
Yeah he retired after "just" twenty five years. He really screwed NASA on that one!
And what, after he retires, he's not supposed to do the most obvious things related to his education and experience? He was working on plasma rockets before he made it to NASA. So is it worse that he's planning to work on plasma rockets to sell to NASA after working for them for a quarter century, rather than going into private industry straight out of college? Why? Because it vaguely fits a stereotype of ex-government employees leaving to work for contractors?
A cynical view I know.
Yeah... What's the word where cynicism is used as a replacement for understanding? Kinda like "blind optimism", but the opposite? Blind cynicism doesn't sound right. As a cynic, I've always liked the expression "cynicism is realism plus experience". But you're not being realistic. So... what is it that you're doing?
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This is the same kind of math used by proponents of President Obama's healthcare socialization package. If you will, it's also the same math used to justify the Soviet command economy.
On paper, eliminating profits saves money for the hypothetical society. In reality, however, eliminating profit also eliminates self-interest, which very effectively stagnates or degrades the enterprise... be it at the level of a single supermarket, or the economy of the wealthiest country on Earth.
The reason why this doesn't work, is because you need several things to get something accomplished. You need the WILL to start it... the RESPONSIBILITY to see it through, and the MEANS to get it done. Socialism helps with the means... but not the will. Capitalism helps with the will, by accepting man as the egotistical bastard he is, and appealing to the basest of desires: greed.
But nothing helps with responsibility. For as long as clerks with 1-inch fingernails will 1-finger-type endless requisition forms to get anything done in large organizations (which includes companies as well as governments) with zero interest or concern for what they are doing, waste will reign supreme. At least in private enterprise, this is somewhat moderated by the need for more profit. A government bureaucracy, on the other hand, is like entropy. It spontaneously expands, and this can only be reversed locally, at an even greater cost to the entire system.
Without oversight by NASA, components won't have the compatibility required to integrate within the launch vehicle. Essentially it means that all of these companies will just be contractors to NASA (Company X builds the fuel injection, Company Y builds the stage seperators, etc). Is that really cheaper than paying NASA employees to develop the same technology?
I was under the impression that VASMIR was a low-thrust technology (high energy, low propellant mass = high Isp, but normally with low absolute thrust). The proposed 200kW model was expected to have a thrust of 5 Newtons, according to wikipedia. Now, that's nice, but it's on the order of the smallest black powder Estes engines used to fly 50-100gram rockets for fun. It will move a space ship, but it will provide relatively low acceleration.
Since sail circumnavigation of the earth can be done in less than 180 days, it's a bit premature to expect us to circumnavigate the 12 billion kM diameter disc which houses our solar system in anything approaching that kind of time frame. Even if you allow for 1000 of these engines running continuously (all 300 metric tons of engines, plus the 200MW power source, plus the ship, shielding, etc. needed), 5kN is going to take quite a while to bring an interplanetary vessel up to any useful speed.
Don't get me wrong - it's cool technology...but it's still a couple of orders of magnitude from sailing around the world.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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So we've got a _really smart_ guy we've paid to educate, paid for many years to perform exactly 7 times... I'm not about to give him a free pass just because he's got a doctorate and a handful of mission patches.
Given your flippant tone, I'm sure you'll be surprised to hear that 7 space shuttle flights is as many as anyone has ever done. Only one other astronaut has as many missions under their belt. This is because space flight is a Big Deal. Astronauts often train for years for a single specific mission.
By the way...how do you amass enough cash to personally invest significantly in this kind of endeavor, considering otherwise "normal" governmental salaries in the 70-130k/year range?Or is he primarily a front man - a very smart one - who is helping to get money from others (perhaps old colleagues with strings to government funds?) to pursue this research.
Front-man... inventor of the technology the company makes... Yeah, same thing.
I'm not saying he's not doing interesting, and possibly valuable, research, but I'm not about to give him a free pass just because he's got a doctorate and a handful of mission patches.
What does that even mean? A "pass" from what? What horrible sin has he allegedly committed? Leaving NASA after a mere twenty five years and a record number of shuttle missions? Turning his research into plasma propulsion into a real invention? Throw me a bone here!
Now, if he's made a bunch of money doing other things (dot com bubble investor?), and is pursuing this as a purely speculative path, then good for him.
Oh I see. So if he'd managed to fund this venture without having done anything productive rather than inventing a new propulsion system, then you'd be cool with it.
WTF is with these comments?
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Bank in 1999. electricity has been generated in space by dragging a copper tether though the earth's magnetic field (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/astronauts-seek-power-in-space-1319781.html).
Presumably this produced drag. Can't this "drag" be used for some near earth maneuvering using a mesh system to create an electromagnetic sail by which one might tack? Or is the amount of force to small to be useful?
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So if Mr. Astronaut became a lobbyist instead that'd be okay too? Or a Medal of Honor winner who pimps his heroism out to lobby for munitions makers seeking gov contracts? Guns and bombs is what he knows right?
But that's not what he's doing, now is it? He's starting a private company, with private investment, and creating what he hopes are practical solutions for other private industries and NASA.
This is exactly what I'm talking about -- "cynicism" is not saying "this will end badly" without concern for the specifics of what "this" is. You have to look at the actual reality and distinguish based on that. "So if he [did something else] that'd be okay too?", implying no distinction based on the actual activity or its outcome, is the opposite of realism.
For a self described cynic (as in always asking "who benefits?") you sure do have a idealistic outlook which goes against the weight of the evidence about who lobbys and for what.
He is going to benefit, obviously so, because he's the CEO of the company. What's the problem again? He's going to get a nice NASA contract, become Yet Another Defense Contractor, and lobby congress to give NASA more funds? Oh noes!
You don't sound like a cynic to me. You sound like a betrayed idealist, with a rosy-eyed view of how things "should" be, and constantly finding that not to be the case. So you say things will end badly in some vague way, without regard to what's actually happening because it doesn't matter.
Personally, seeing someone trying to use the 'best of both worlds' of private enterprise and government contracts to drag NASA kicking and screaming out of the 60s warms my cynical heart.
The enemies of Democracy are
I'm not sure you understand the potential that any particular astronaut has to ruin hundreds of billions of dollars of government investment. If an astronaut meant to, or just screwed up at something that may have seemed inconsequential at the time, the deaths of the people onboard would be, while publicly tear-jerking, relatively inconsequential compared to the gross loss of capital for the agency. (Less now that they're intending to stop using the shuttles altogether, but to some degree still.)
The fact that he made it through training and became an astronaut means that he was worthy of being trusted with a hundred-billion-plus dollar space ship. That's what the training is for. That's why we pay their training, and why we pay them. Not only could they die in a spectacular fireball if they make the wrong mistake--or if someone else does--but it's possible they could completely ruin NASA's chances of ever being useful again by swaying public opinion. A single person could--or could have--singlehandedly set back mankind's exploration of space by decades or longer.
And you've really got the balls to say that spending the money that he got as part of that trust to keep advancing something he loves and believes in is less respectable than if he had taken his money, gambled with it on the stock market, and taken whatever gains he had and spent them on this as an outsider?
Disclosure: I am related to a former high-ranking NASA employee, and while that doesn't make me an expert, I do have at least SOME sense of scale about the damned thing.
Despite it's high specific impulse this engine isn't the whole answer to the exploration of the solar system. Blame the inverse square law.
It may be feasible to power an slow unmanned Earth-Moon VASIMR transfer vehicle with solar, but at Mars solar radiation is only 25% as strong and at Jupiter it's 4%. So you are talking about nuclear for probes to the outer planets and for manned missions to anywhere.
There's nothing technological that would stop space-based nuclear but you just know it'll take years to get that done.
New Scientist has an article that says VASIMR + nuclear = 39-day transit time to Mars.
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Spot the logical fallacy after I've corrected your basic error. With the technology to perform (unmanned) interplanetary missions and retrieve resources from around the solar system the amount of raw stuff that we need to hoist up the gravity well diminishes considerably. Currently if want to attempt a manned interplanetary mission we need to lift every last gram that it needs from the surface. Orbital manufacturing and resource retrieval are orders of magnitude more important than improving our capability to lift things into orbit - because they reduce the amount that we need to lift by orders of magnitude.
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Odds are, he's gone this route, because the current structure of the Federal government is such that it's much easier to fund and develop a project through a private corporation receiving federal funding than it is to have the agency to the actual work.
(This is nothing particularly new either. Although it's my understanding that NASA used to do more in-house engineering work than it currently does, rocket engines have been privately sourced since the days of Apollo, and possibly even earlier.)
He worked with NASA for 25 years before retirement, and was by all appearances, a model employee of the agency, not to mention the immense personal sacrifices he gave as an astronaut (years of training for an incredibly risky job that only lasts for a few days). I'm astonished by the negative tone being used in these comment threads, given that the guy is clearly displaying great scientific ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit.
Although I'd like to see NASA cultivate its own talent, as far as I'm aware, he's working well within the bounds of the system. Seriously....you're trying to fault a guy who's advanced the state of science and risked his own life numerous times by doing so for trying to make money by doing so. Are you going to now start complaining about how our greedy, money-grubbing soldiers want to eat while deployed?
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Okay let's start off with why your nuts.
1. His Astronaut training that he got from NASA would have ZERO to do with a plasma rocket. He would get lots of training on how to operate the Space Shuttle systems and how to try and not die if things went very wrong.
2. His time in the advanced propulsion department might have something to do with with this but NASA doesn't make stuff. They may design stuff but then they have outside companies build the stuff.
In this case he is probably taking a project that was getting less funding than is spent on research of the American Bison flea and is getting outside funding for it. You really don't get rich starting a space technology company. It is a passion for a lot of people and I would say good show and I hope it works.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
... a gallon of gasoline could potentially lift a human into orbit, less spaceship.
Actually it's quite a bit more than a gallon. (LEO is very high and very fast. Other orbits are moreso.) But the basic idea is sound.
Rockets are HORRIBLE energy-spenders. (Their big advantage is that they do work and are self-contained.) That's why there's all that work on various "space elevators", where you can use electric motors (or the equivalent), at efficiencies in the 75 to 98% range from electricity to kinetic energy, to move stuff from the ground to LEO, geosynch, or otherwise get it persistently off the ground and out of the atmosphere.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Um... because for us real humans, money is not our only (pointless) reason of existence.
That's just something poor people say.
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Mass of ISS = 3x10^5 Kg .333x10-5 = 3.33x10-6 m/sec^2
Diameter of Pluto's major orbital axis = 14x10^9m
Thrust from a 200KW VASMIR engine = 5 newtons
f=ma=5N so a=f/m=1/(3x10^5)=
s=1/2 at^2 so t=sqrt(2s/a)
t=sqrt((28x10^9) / (3.33*10^-6)) = 1061 days
So as anyone who completed high school physics can see even one of these engines can cross the entire solar system along Pluto's major axis in just under 3 years or about the amount of time it took Magellan's crew to circumnavigate the globe.
This is a silly example of course. Orbits aren't straight lines. Why would anyone want to completely cross the solar system? (At most you would cross half) climbing out of the gravity well would be slower and falling in would be faster. I also assume you want to stop at your destination so half the trip would be spent in deceleration.
But it does show the power of even one of these engines if you can carry the fuel and a power source. It is the magic of constant low acceleration without opposing friction. It is why ion engines are attractive and VASMIR is a step up from them.
This is the kind of engine that will allow us to settle the solar system. Now if only we can find a good way to climb out of this stinking gravity well!
VASIMR is for in space propulsion only. Even then there are alternatives which require less outrageous amounts of energy to work in a reasonably efficient fashion such as ion engines.
What this and other EP do is reduce the amount of fuel needed to get from LEO to where ever you're going. If you can reduce the mass fraction from say 2:1 to 1:2, you've cut your on-orbit mass in half, and thus can use a launch vehicle that's half the size.
While reducing the cost of the access to orbit is important, it doesn't mean that this is 'idiotic' and doesn't solve anything. I have issues with VASIMR (its always seemed very vapor-ish), but if its eventually capable of doing what it requires it will be a great tool for interplanetary missions. Something that can cut your launch costs in half isn't something to sneeze at.
In addition, it has one big advantage over, say, a space elevator. It is likely to eventually work in the next few decades(even if it is late and overbudget), and doesn't require materials that don't exist.
Rockets are pretty efficient actually.
Their disadvantage is that they have to carry their working fluid with them. To get into orbit you need to gain over 8km/s of horizontal velocity and to do that you want to get above the majority of the atmosphere ASAP - so you quickly leave the area where you could snatch any external substance to use for propulsion.
Space elevators are not an automatic fix either - electric motors require power and to carry the kind of power supply that could lift you up a distance equal to about 5 times the diameter of the Earth would give you much the same engineering problems as a rocket.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
I'm guessing you're American, or at least a legal resident alien, since you're saying "we paid"
But from your post, I'm also going to guess that you went to private primary, secondary, and higher education schools. Either that or you graciously provide your services to society for no additional cost.
Otherwise, we paid for 90+% of your education and you're churlishly demanding payment for a job that you got because of your education.
I don't expect morality, equality, consistency, or justice from the law. I expect only legality.
If I'm designing a mission I'd be pretty happy to be able to cut my costs in half. Granted, it would be great to have a very cheap way to get to orbit, but as a practical engineer I'm much more impressed by a mostly functional prototype at the recommended scale with proper funding than I am by some theoretical work. While I have no reason to believe that laser propulsion will not work, it is at a TRL level of 2 from everything I can tell, while VASIMR is at TRL 6.
As someone looking at what I actually want to use to complete a mission, I'm much more interested in something that can cut my costs in half and is likely to be available within the next 10 years, than I am with something that has some paper concepts and a few basic lab experiments. I try not to be too much of a naysayer of new technology, but at the same time , comparing something entirely theoretical to something with significant amounts of development is absurd. Yes, if laser propulsion (or any other kind of new method to reach orbit) turns out to be a practical development it will be a much bigger deal, but in the meantime I find something that (almost) exists and reduces launch costs by half pretty valuable.
So we've got a _really smart_ guy we've paid to educate, paid for many years to perform exactly 7 times, paid to direct a "cool" program, and now that we've shelled out all that money, he's investing some of it in hopes of selling us some product we spent years paying him to learn about.
By the way...how do you amass enough cash to personally invest significantly in this kind of endeavor, considering otherwise "normal" governmental salaries in the 70-130k/year range? Or is he primarily a front man - a very smart one - who is helping to get money from others (perhaps old colleagues with strings to government funds?) to pursue this research.
I'm not saying he's not doing interesting, and possibly valuable, research, but I'm not about to give him a free pass just because he's got a doctorate and a handful of mission patches. Now, if he's made a bunch of money doing other things (dot com bubble investor?), and is pursuing this as a purely speculative path, then good for him.
Honestly, you know what the above reads like? I'll summarize it for you:
Whaaaaa! He's a succesful astronaut who spent the better part of his life doing something totally awesome and now gets to spend another part of his life doing yet more totally awesome stuff while I sit here staring at my penis and wondering why it is so tiny. Not fair!
Jealous much?
This guy went up 7 times, each time knowing fully well that there's a pretty decent chance the whole thing would end up in a big-ass ball of flame. Do you also complain about military personnel being schooled and trained on your dime? All they ever do is kill people, this guy has risked his life for the sake of science.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.