Ion Drive!

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**Frankenberry**

Ion Thruster Sets World Record
While the Dawn spacecraft is visiting the asteroids Vesta and Ceres, NASA Glenn has been developing the next generation of ion thrusters for future missions. NASA's Evolutionary Xenon Thruster (NEXT) Project has developed a 7-kilowatt ion thruster that can provide the capabilities needed in the future.

An ion thruster produces small levels of thrust relative to chemical thrusters, but does so at higher specific impulse (or higher exhaust velocities), which means that an ion thruster has a fuel efficiency of 10-12 times greater than a chemical thruster. The higher the rocket's specific impulse (fuel efficiency), the farther the spacecraft can go with a given amount of fuel. Given that an ion thruster produces small levels of thrust relative to chemical thrusters, it needs to operate in excess of 10,000 hours to slowly accelerate the spacecraft to speeds necessary to reach the asteroid belt or beyond.

The NEXT ion thruster has been operated for over 43,000 hours, which for rocket scientists means that the thruster has processed over 770 kilograms of xenon propellant and can provide 30 million-newton-seconds of total impulse to the spacecraft. This demonstrated performance permits future science spacecraft to travel to varied destinations, such as extended tours of multi-asteroids, comets, and outer planets and their moons.

Might lead to some pretty awesome exploration I think.

**FoWPlayerDeathOfUS.TDs**

Cool. How much does this shorten the Earth to Mars Trip?

**notprop**

This is great news.

All we have to do is duct-tape two of those suckers together and we are another step closer to this bad boy.

**Frankenberry**

@FoW - I think I read somewhere that it merely makes travel more fuel efficient, but doesn't really increase inertia.

@notprop - You sir, win the thread.

**hotsauceman1**

How long till we can overcharge it for a large blast template?

**notprop**

hotsauceman1 wrote:
How long till we can overcharge it for a large blast template?

That'll probably happen about 2 minutes after they turn it on

**hotsauceman1**

Cool we can strap it to one of those Home made exoskeletons people make from thier backyard.
Im liking this idea

**Avatar 720**

No word on NPP?

**Laughing Man**

Not until they solve that whole pesky Nuclear Test Ban Treaty problem.

**Grey Templar**

Easy enough. International treaties are only as enforceable as the parties involved have ability or desire to enforce them through military or economic pressure.

Its why I find the Geneva Conventions so utterly laughable.

**Laughing Man**

The problem is the Russians and Chinese have a REALLY GOOD WAY to enforce the nuclear test ban treaty. They're called "nukes," and since using a NPP drive means using most of ours and EMPing a hemisphere of our choice, I doubt they'd approve.

**AlexHolker**

This is certainly an interesting development. Irrelevant to manned space flight unless it's used to set up infrastructure, but good for anything without a deadline.

**SilverMK2**

Frankenberry wrote:
@FoW - I think I read somewhere that it merely makes travel more fuel efficient, but doesn't really increase inertia.

The amount of thrust it puts out means that any ship it is the engine for would have to be relatively small in order to have "high" levels of acceleration and therefore faster transit times.