Starship SN9 is continuing to wait for clearance from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ahead of her test flight, with a launch date still up in the air. Although the overall schedule delay is relatively short, pent-up production cadence saw SN10 jump at the opportunity to roll down Boca Chica’s Highway 4 late last week.
Dr. Fatima Ebrahimi designed a fusion rocket that uses magnetic fields to shoot plasma particles from a craft, which could take humans to Mars 10 times faster than current devices.
Behold, Starships SN9 and SN10.
SpaceX has two Starship vehicles, SN9 and SN10, on the test pad at the same time at its South Texas facility, a first for the company.
The unique design of the plasma thruster could enable spacecraft to travel to distant planets much faster than they can now.
A new type of rocket thruster that could take humankind to Mars and beyond has been proposed by a physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL).
The device would apply magnetic fields to cause particles of plasma (link is external), electrically charged gas also known as the fourth state of matter, to shoot out the back of a rocket and, because of the conservation of momentum, propel the craft forward. Current space-proven plasma thrusters use electric fields to propel the particles.
The new concept would accelerate the particles using magnetic reconnection, a process found throughout the universe, including the surface of the sun, in which magnetic field lines converge, suddenly separate, and then join together again, producing lots of energy. Reconnection also occurs inside doughnut-shaped fusion (link is external) devices known as tokamaks (link is external).
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The first private space flight led by Axiom with SpaceX is set to take off next year to the ISS during an eight day mission, carrying three civilians who each paid $55 million for their seat.
