An artist's impression of VASIMR - a rocket that may cut down the travel time to Mars to just 39 days.
Credit: NASA
WASHINGTON: A journey from Earth to Mars could eventually take just 39 days - cutting current travel time nearly six times - according to a rocket scientist who has the ear of U.S. space agency NASA.
Franklin Chang-Diaz, a former astronaut and a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, says reaching the Red Planet could be dramatically quicker using his high-tech VASIMR rocket, now on track for liftoff after decades of development.
The Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket - to give its full name - is quick becoming a centrepiece of NASA's future strategy as it looks to private firms to help meet the astronomical costs of space exploration.
Private companies building rockets
NASA, still reeling from a political decision to cancel its Constellation program that would have returned a human to the Moon by the end of the decade, has called on firms to provide new technology to power rovers or even future manned missions.
Hopes are now pinned on firms such as Chang-Diaz's Texas-based Ad Astra Rocket Company.
"In the early days ... NASA support for the project was rather minimal because the agency did not emphasize advanced technologies as much as it's doing now," Chang-Diaz said.
Rocket technology has been lagging
NASA was focused instead on the series of Apollo missions that delivered men to the moon for the first, and so far last, times.
"They were mesmerised by the Apollo days and lived in the Apollo era for 40 years, and they just forgot [about] developing something new," he said.
Chang-Diaz, 60, hopes that "something" is a non-chemical rocket that eventually allow for a manned trip to Mars - long the Holy Grail for Apollonians.
Plasma gas gives acceleration
His rocket would use electricity to transform a fuel - likely hydrogen, helium or deuterium - into plasma gas, a hot gas made up of ions, that is heated to 11 million degrees Celsius. The plasma gas is then channelled into tailpipes using magnetic fields to propel the spacecraft.
That would send a shuttle-type vehicle hurtling toward the Moon or Mars at ever-faster speeds - up to an estimated 55 km per second - until the engines are reversed.
Chang-Diaz, a veteran of seven space missions, said this rapid acceleration could allow for trips of just 39 days instead of the current anticipated round trip voyage to Mars that would last three years, including a forced stay of 18 months on the Red Planet, as astronauts await an opening to return to Earth.
More Power means less Travel-time
VASIMR *might* get to Mars in 39 days, but we can't power a VASIMR that can get that sort of performance yet. The '39 day' figure depends on a 200 MW nuclear reactor sufficiently light that VASIMR can push it and the rest of the space-ship at 'high' acceleration. No such space-capable reactor yet exists. A more modest 12 MW reactor design can power VASIMR for a 115 day trip to Mars (for the crew-lander as the cargo-ship takes ~130 days longer to get into orbit), but such 'large' space-reactors don't yet exist and aren't getting funded.
So VASIMR would be great, but its power supply is what really needs the research dollars.
mars in 39 days
The article infers, but doesn't make clear, that this new system is capable of taking off and landing on earth, mars etc. If it isn't, perhaps a chemical booster may still be needed to get it into orbit. If it is, depending on the power of the reactor available there is a lot of work to be done in increasing the efficiency and decreasing the size and weight of reactors.
Either way, the possibility of a reactor powered vessel blowing up in the atmosphere or crashing is not going to win much public support.Time to think outside the square and come up with a new safe source of power.
Elmohu, Brisbane
Mars Trip Problem
Without a large, heavy-lift conventional rocket to get this plasma rocket into low earth orbit, no one will be using it to go to Mars, or anywhere else. Obama just cancelled all the heavy-lift rocket options for the foreseeable future. Maybe once we pay to perfect it, we can sell it to China for their Mars trip.