VASIMR, or the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket, is not new. Rather, it has been researched at considerable government expense by its inventor, Franklin Chang Diaz, for three decades.

A VASIMR does not produce enough thrust to escape the Earth's gravity, but this is not a design flaw. Since ion engines work best in a vacuum, the VASIMR engine is suited for space travel only.

A VASIMR rocket on the ISS would have many uses, one of which would be to reboost the station to higher altitudes. With the looming retirement of the space shuttle, which used to handle that job ...

For the VASIMR rocket, the exit velocity is closer to 50 km/s. If your material is exiting 10 times faster, you have to expend 10 times less of it for the same thrust.

The VASIMR® engine has its roots in magnetic plasma confinement studies conducted in the late 1970s at the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory and The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Vasimr engines can get up to 50,000 ISP which is 1100 times more fuel efficient than the Space Shuttle. The nuclear space vehicle would weigh about 600-1500 tons fully fulled. So it would take several ...

New York, July 21, 2020 -- Reportlinker.com announces the release of the report "VASIMR (Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket) Engine" -.

It’s just not that easy for humans to get to Mars - it's a long, long way away. But astronaut and rocket scientist Franklin Chang Díaz reckons there's a smarter way to get there: the VASIMR engine.

Vasimr has different quoted exhaust velocity ranges for different propellants – * argon has a limit of around 50,000 m/s * 300,000 m/s is possible with hydrogen. The 39 day mission to Mars using ...

The most advanced VASIMR engine is Ad Astra's 200-kilowatt VX-200. The pathway to the VX-200 was discussed at the 33rd International Electric Propulsion Conference, held at The George Washington ...

When Ars visited Ad Astra early in 2017, it was pulsing its rocket for about 30 seconds at a time. Now, the company is firing VASIMR for about five minutes at a time, founder Franklin Chang-Diaz ...