Plasma Jet Electric Thrusters for Spacecraft

I'm excited because it shows that more individuals are willing to take on far-reaching projects rather than build another mobile picture app. I hope some deep pocketed investors vet them and get them the resources they need.

This is the sort of thing I love to see on Kickstarter. Best of luck!

First, what is this? It's a pulsed plasma thruster, which is basically just a railgun that shoots puffs of ionized gas (plasma) instead of metal slugs.

Second, what's so great about it? Well, electric propulsion is a fantastic way to get around in space (once you are in Earth's orbit or above) because it's so efficient. The rocket equation is brutal, it imposes an exponential fuel burden based on the ratio of how fast you want to go (delta V) to how fast the exhaust of your rocket is (exhaust velocity). Unfortunately, a lot of missions have delta V requirements that are on the scale of or significantly greater than the exhaust velocity of chemical rockets (around 3-4 km/s), which means that we'll always be dealing with rockets that are mostly fuel and even then can only just barely get us to our destination. Electric propulsion systems, such as ion engines, make it possible to have vastly higher exhaust velocities (e.g. 30 km/s), which vastly improves the efficiency of the rockets by an inordinate amount. For example, using a chemical rocket to go from Earth to Mars would require at least 180% of the dry weight of the rocket and payload being used up as fuel, whereas an ion engine could do the same job while using about 1/12th as much fuel.

The down sides of existing forms of electric propulsion are fairly severe though. They generate very little thrust and so must run for a long time to be useful. For example, the Dawn spacecraft will only accumulate about 1 km/s of delta V every 6 months. This means that some missions are unsuitable for electric propulsion, especially manned missions (where travel time is more critical). However, these pulsed plasma thrusters could potentially generate around one to two orders of magnitude more thrust for the same size of engine, making them much more suitable for high-delta-v missions or even use with manned spacecraft.

Additionally, ion engines use a grid that is exposed to the flow of the ions that become the exhaust, and that grid can often become fouled or eroded by the flow, limiting the effective service life of the thruster, whereas pulsed plasma thrusters have much different limits.

Third, why hasn't NASA already worked on this technology? Well, partly because ion engines have seemed to some like a more worthwhile technology. However, ion engines have received a lot of commercial development and are fairly commonly used on geostationary satellites, and there the low thrust is not a problem. So partly it's also that NASA has mostly just made use of otherwise well-proven, off the shelf technologies.

Overall the project is probably worth at least a few bucks if you have any interesting in advancing the technology of spaceflight.

Kind of like the story of Alexander Fleming where he was trying to find some enzymes to kill bacteria, and accidentally figured out that mold in his sink kills the bacteria, and invents penicillin.

We need something like that, again, for electric engines.

http://www.essortment.com/alexander-fleming-discovery-penici...

2) Your highest investment pledge ($10k or more) is an insult to the investor. They will essentially pay for 1/7th of your company, while getting no % of your company in return.

3) Your presentation is OK, but you really need to put microphones closer to the speaker.