Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
A rocket capable of sending astronauts to Mars in just six weeks rather than six months sounds impossible, but that’s exactly what one Texas company is working on – and they just received a NASA grant to continue working on the advanced propulsion technology.
The rocket is being built by the Ad Astra Rocket Company, and according to the Huffington Post it uses plasma and magnets to propel spacecraft that are already in orbit over greater distance and at higher speeds than is currently possible. In ideal conditions, it could reach Mars in 39 days.
Developing a plasma-based propulsion system
The technology is known as the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASMIR), and according to Ad Astra, it operates using the electrically-charged gas known as plasma, which can be heated to extreme temperatures by radio waves and guided using strong magnetic fields.
The magnetic field also insulates nearby structures in order to keep exhaust temperatures under the melting point of materials, they added. In rocket propulsion, the velocity and fuel efficiency of rockets increase along with the temperature of the exhaust gases, but a plasma rocket is said to outperform its chemical-based counterparts in both categories, the company claims.
Despite NASA’s support, is the VASMIR project feasible?
Ad Astra was one of three companies to receive grants under NASA’s Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships (NextSTEP) program to continue the development of the VASMIR rocket technology. They were awarded $10 million over a three-year period to advance a current prototype to Level 5 Technology Readiness Level, bringing it closer to being space-ready.
“We are thrilled by this announcement and proud to be joining forces with NASA in the final steps of the technology maturation,” former NASA astronaut/current Ad Astra CEO Dr. Franklin Chang-Díaz, a veteran of seven shuttle missions, said in a statement. “We look forward to a very successful partnership as we jointly advance the technology to flight readiness.”
A solar powered lunar tug concept using two VASIMR® engines. (Credit: Ad Astra Rocket)
However, the company could be facing an uphill battle. They plan to build a prototype that could operate at high power for a minimum of 100 hours, but thus far the engine has only been used for less than one minute at a time, and critics doubt that the VASMIR concept is realistic.
In fact, last year, Mars Society president Robert Zubrin said that Ad Astra’s rocket would require “nuclear electric power systems with 10,000 times the power and 1/100th the mass per unit power as any that have ever been built,” according to the Huffington Post. He also sent an open letter to Dr. Chang-Diaz challenging him to a debate over Mars-related travel technology.
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