A conical shell plasma plume fires from a student-built space thruster in an Aero-Astro Space Propulsion Laboratory vacuum chamber. As electric thrusters' power comes from solar arrays, they can operate continuously for months, attaining velocities practically unachievable for missions using chemically-fueled engines.
economy. With today’s techniques, we are miniaturizing communications, attitude, payload, control, power, and other subsystems of spacecraft. There is no apparent reason why a fully functional satellite the size of a hand-held MP3 player could not be built today — only missing from the equation is a comparably-sized propulsion subsystem that would allow the small object to perform for an extended period of time just as well as its heavyweight satellite cousins. Very small satellites, or clusters of them, could fill a niche market in
LOZANO: Future of Rocket Engines
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