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NASA Contracting Development of New Ion/Nuclear Engines (nasaspaceflight.com)
schwit1 writes: NASA has awarded three different companies contracts to develop advanced ion and nuclear propulsion systems for future interplanetary missions, both manned and unmanned. These are development contacts, all below $10 million. However, they all appeared structured like NASA's cargo and crew contracts for ISS, where the contractor does all of the development and design, with NASA only supplying some support and periodic payments when the contractor achieves agreed-upon milestones. Because of this, the contractors will own the engines they develop, and will be able to sell them to other customers after development, thereby increasing the competition and innovation in the field.
Whatever happened with the emdrive?
We need a type of global federation where every nation can pool all resources and develop a star-ship like craft. Every industry should be brought in on the effort, like how the US auto manufactures transitioned to building war-time equipment, etc. Even school students and independent inventors should be brought in.
And is this for a Fighter?
You are all cows. Cows say moo. MOOOO! MOOOO! Moo cows MOOOO! Moo say the cows. YOU ATOMIC COWS!!
NASA should sponsor a study into harnessing measurement error as a means of propulsion. I always keep hearing everybody talking about it.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Hohohohohoho enjoy your -1 down moderation Coren22 posting by unidentifiable anonymous.
VASIMR has been ready to go to a full-scale trial on ISS for a while now. Then the ISS won't be so dependent upon Progress supply missions to give it orbital boosts. This thing will be powerful enough that they have to have batteries in it because the ISS solar panels aren't powerful enough to run it at full power.
But I'd be happier if I saw a date when it would actually get launched for installation on ISS. It looks like they will still be building the first engines through summer 2016. After that it's not clear if the tests are meant to be done on ground. They're also talking about having it run for 100 continuous hours in the third year of the contract, which is more than what ISS needs, so maybe they'll send one up to ISS in 2017 or 2018?
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
... thereby increasing the competition and innovation in the field.
Forgive my bad French, but that's the sort of ideologic bullshit you can't prove. NASA saves money from an embarrassingly tiny budget; that is the only benefit this type of arrangement provides. It does the precise opposite of increasing competition, since one company will have a government-sanctioned monopoly; if it didn't and NASA placed the designs into the public domain, then ANY company could make the engines and sell them to NASA, improving NASA's supply chain. Have you forgotten why our computers are dominated by Intel processors? IBM made the decision to use an Intel processor because Intel had co-fab agreements with other companies, meaning that IBM wasn't solely dependent upon Intel alone for supply, while Motorola was the sole supplier for 68000 processors.
Nuclear Thermal Rockets worked, there's just the whole radiation thing but that's where the research dollars should be going if we're that serious about doing a manned mission to anywhere. IMHO.