Plasma Rocket May Shorten Space Voyages

By Irene Klotz
Tue May 4, 2010 07:00 AM ET

 

 THE GIST

• NASA is looking at flying a plasma-powered rocket to survey an asteroid.
• The rocket is a twin of one being developed for testing aboard the International Space Station.
• This new rocket could shorten the time it takes to get to destinations in our solar system.

This photo, taken during a test of the new rocket, shows a VASMIR prototype operating at full power in a vacuum environment.
Kat's Photography/Ad Astra Rocket Co.

An innovative plasma rocket being built as a spare for one heading to the International Space Station may have a space mission of its own: visiting an asteroid.

Equipped with an electric propulsion system, the rocket, known as Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR), is being developed to one day transport astronauts to Mars in 39 to 45 days -- a fraction of the six to nine months the trip would take with conventional chemical rockets. Shorter travel time greatly reduces astronauts' exposure to potentially deadly cosmic and solar radiation, currently a show-stopper for human missions to Mars.

Setting sail for an asteroid would be a powerful demonstration of VASIMR technology, which uses radio waves to ionize propellant -- such as argon, xenon or hydrogen -- and heat the resulting plasma to temperatures 20 times hotter than the surface of the sun. In place of metal nozzles to control the direction of the exhaust, VASIMR uses magnetic fields.

"All of a sudden, the future is here," said VASIMR inventor and physicist Franklin Chang-Diaz, a seven-time shuttle flier who left NASA in 2005 to start a company and work full time developing the rocket.

WATCH VIDEO: With thousands of asteroids, comets and other near-Earth object buzzing by our planet, Jorge Ribas finds out how we can avoid the same fate as the dinosaurs.

Related Links:

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• Rocket Ready To Go Nowhere
• Mars Microbes May Juice Up On Rocket Fuel
• HowStuffWorks.com: What If an Asteroid Hit Earth?
• Bizarre Asteroid Collision is One For The X-Files

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Chang Diaz's Houston-based Ad Astra Rocket Co., which has raised millions of dollars from private investors, reached a significant milestone last year when it successfully operated a demonstrator VASIMR at full power in a vacuum chamber.

"The engine is actually firing right now," Chang-Diaz told Discovery News. "We have lots of hurdles and challenges; we have lots of work to do. But if you look at what has happened in the last five years since we left NASA, it's been amazing."

Ad Astra plans to launch its flight version VASIMR to the space station in 2014. As a backup, Chang-Diaz intends to manufacture two engines in case a launch accident or other major problem prevents the first from reaching the outpost.

Once the engine is safely installed outside the station, the spare could be tapped for a new mission -- one that did not require investment by NASA.

"I had this idea that maybe there's a way we can use this backup engine that he's already building," said Rob Kelso, a former shuttle flight director at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston now working to build innovative partnerships between NASA and commercial firms.

While the space station's VASIMR can draw power from the outpost, a free-flying engine will need its own source. As part of the proposed asteroid mission, NASA and Ad Astra would team with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to use its super-efficient, 200-kilowatt solar array currently under development.

Once the rocket reached its target asteroid, the power would be available to operate science equipment and other gear.

"You could do an extraordinary mission," Chang-Diaz said. "You don't need the power system for the rocket. Once you're there, you turn off the engine and you have 200 kilowatts to do anything you want to do. You can do all kinds of unheard of things with that level of power."

In addition to radar mapping and surveys, the mission also could pick up a sample from the asteroid and return it to Earth. Scientists are interested in learning more about where asteroids came from, how they formed and whether they carry the ingredients for life.  On a practical level, learning how asteroids are structured would be useful in case one is discovered to be on a collision course with Earth and needs to be moved.

The mission also fits with the new direction President Barack Obama has outlined for NASA. Obama wants to cancel the return-to-the-moon program NASA had been developing and instead spend money on producing and testing new technologies for deep space exploration. During a speech at Kennedy Space Center earlier this month, Obama specifically called for a human mission to an asteroid by 2025.

The VASIMR asteroid mission is among several proposals currently being assessed by a NASA study team.  If selected, the mission could fly somewhere around 2017, Kelso said.

Approval of Cape Cod's Offshore Wind Project Gives Turbine Industry a Big Boost

By Chris Morrison | Apr 28, 2010

Despite opposition from environmentalists and preservationists, naturists, Native Americans, and even a prominent member of the Kennedy family, the first major offshore wind farm in the United States has finally gotten a green light: Cape Wind just won its nine year fight to erect 130 wind turbines in theNantucket Sound.

The fate of Cape Wind was uncertain until today, dependent on a decision from Interior secretary Ken Salazar. Even following the Department of the Interior announcement, some opponents of the project remain determined to fight, according to the Washington Post. But with a lengthy court battle the only remaining option, it’s likely wind turbines will start going up even as dissenters continue to argue against them.

More important than just the Cape wind turbines, Salazar’s decision is a significant win for the entire wind industry, which has increasingly been forced to fight NIMBYism in recent years. Opinions on how,  vary. The Boston Globe asked other project developers how Cape Wind would affect business:

“Now we’ve got the signal that the US is willing to permit offshore wind facilities, and I think you are going to see some greater movement with other offshore wind projects in the near future,” [Deepwater Wind's Jim] Lanard said. “It makes it more likely that we can keep our US dollars here in this country as manufacturers start to migrate here.”

At American Superconductor Corp. in Devens, which both designs and builds electrical systems for wind turbines, spokesman Jason Fredette called the Cape Wind approval a “positive development,” but said he sees the US wind industry building out only over time.

The most important aspect of Cape Wind may not be an immediate payout in projects, but a psychological boost for wind developers, convincing them that the government views their business positively.

Wind developers have their eyes on plenty of offshore territory on the East Coast, of course, and they will probably seek to secure more funding and contracts over the coming year. But there’s also the potential to place hundreds of wind turbines on the Great Lakes. The problem is that some local residents, as at the Nantucket Sound, have fiercely opposed any turbines in their vicinity.

That opposition won’t disappear. But with the Cape Wind feather in their caps, project developers in the region may now decide to fight it out with their detractors. If Cape Wind had been canceled, that would not have been the case. For the moment, the industry has the wind at its back.

Focusing 192 lasers on one little target

Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory reported Thursday they have taken a major step toward harnessing the forces that power the sun in an effort to create unlimited energy on Earth.

In experiments at the lab's National Ignition Facility, the scientists successfully fired an array of 192 laser beams at a helium-filled target no larger than a BB shot and instantly heated it to 6 million degrees Fahrenheit. The gas vanished in a tiny explosion.

The scientists said that result marked the most important advance yet in more than 10 years of work at the $3.5 billion facility.

They are seeking two major goals:

-- To create in miniature the explosions of thermonuclear weapons in order to validate the computer codes that test the safety and reliability of America's nuclear stockpile.

-- To show that the immensely powerful lasers can achieve safe fusion reactions that could be scaled up for the eventual production of unlimited and clean energy, a dream nuclear scientists have been pursuing for more than five decades.

Working toward 'ignition'

The successful experiments by a team of 35 physicists, led by ignition facility scientists Siegfried H. Glenzer and L. Jeffrey Atherton, were described Thursday in the online edition of the journal Science. In coming months the team will start a new round of experiments seeking finally to achieve what they call "ignition" - a true thermonuclear reaction inside the laboratory's tiny targets.

"We're confident of our ability to start seeking ignition this summer," Atherton said in an interview. "And we're optimistic that at some point soon we'll achieve it."

To achieve that thermonuclear reaction, the scientists will attempt to use the lasers' immensely powerful beams to reach temperatures of more than 200 million degrees Fahrenheit and pressures millions of times greater than Earth's atmosphere - conditions found only in the interior of the sun and stars.

The beryllium target will be filled with deuterium and tritium - the isotopes of hydrogen - frozen into a crystal at 424 degrees below zero Fahrenheit and blasted by the lasers in a billionth of a second. The target will be held inside a tiny gold cylinder called a hohlraum, about the size of a pencil eraser.

If those experiments succeed, the hydrogen isotopes would be crushed instantly and explode inward until they fuse and yield vastly more energy than the laser beams had pumped into them.

The National Ignition Facility is a 10-story building that was dedicated in May on the heavily guarded and highly classified Livermore site. But for many decades, Livermore scientists foresaw the need for increasingly powerful lasers to reach ignition. Lasers called Janus, Cyclops, Argus and the 20-beam laser named Shiva were used to conduct crucial experiments that led to the 10-year development of the laser array.

Thermonuclear reactions

The new laser array will be used to trigger thermonuclear reactions mimicking in miniature the deadly energy of thermonuclear weapons, and those efforts are the principal aim of the project. It is largely funded by the National Nuclear Security Agency, which oversees America's arsenal of nuclear weapons and seeks to maintain their safety and reliability as the weapons age.

But many scientists foresee that experiments like the ones at the ignition facility could lead the way to the eventual construction of large-scale fusion reactor power plants capable of generating countless megawatts of electricity using the hydrogen isotopes from ocean water as endless fuel.

B. Grant Logan, director of a separate and unclassified attempt to achieve ignition based at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said the new report is highly encouraging.

The report, he said in an e-mail, shows "remarkable progress toward the scientific demonstration of fusion ignition and energy gain in the laboratory for the first time in the world. At the rate they are going," he said, "it does appear to me that fusion ignition will be demonstrated soon."

By David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor

Sustainable Forestry Enters Global Financial Arena

Tropical deforestation is one of the most critical environmental issues we face. It has dramatic impact on biodiversity, water resources, and is a significant contributor to climate change. Not to mention that it is the engine the creates oxygen for us to breath!  achieving a balance between economic development in the form of forest products harvesting and deforestation for farming and population growth has proven difficult, and the expansion of certified sustainable forestry has moved forward at a glacial pace. This is a major issue for companies involved in the supply chain, from forest producers, traders, processors, and end buyers to banks that finance forestry.  This is also a critical balance to achieve for preservation of the worlds "pharacological superstore" as Sean Connery once put it.

Fortunately, there is growing interest in the sustainability issues linked to forestry and the risks and opportunities they pose for indigenous populations as well as the financial sector. Many financial institutions are faced with the pressure to make financial commitments for financing of forestry and sustainable development projects. The challenges include awareness and education for indigenous populations and their governments and developing consistent and effective policies, implementation and monitoring procedures for sustainable forestry.

Following the Geneva Summit, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) have launched the Sustainable Forest Finance Toolkit, which aims to support the finance sector in progressing towards the sustainable financing of industries impacting forests.

It provides financial institutions with guidance in client acceptance procedures, portfolio management, designing a clear and pragmatic forestry policy and the creation of internal procurement policies for forestry products.

The toolkit has undergone extensive stakeholder review involving leading banks, forestry industry companies, non-governmental organizations, certification bodies, governments, investors, asset managers and multilateral institutions.

The toolkit is available for download as a complimentary resource at: www.pwc.co.uk/forestfinancetoolkit . 

Finally, Good News for Cape Wind. Maybe

Cape Wind, http://www.capewind.org/  the first of its kind, offshore windfarm, in Nantucket Sound seems to have some new life as a priority for President Obama's initiatives to develop renewable energy sources and increase jobs in advanced technology.  Valid priorities with powerful benefits to be sure.  unfortunately this $1Billion project with its jobs, economic boost for the Northeast and boon for wind-energy has been plagued by opposition from every direction.  Some of it suprising to say the least.  Local Politicians, including the Kennedy Family and former Mass. Governor Mitt Romney, prominent business leaders and even local Native American groups have filed suits and stonewalled at every turn.  So much for stated commitment to the environment and local economies when one's view of the ocean might be altered, slightly.  On the bright side, US Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar said yesterday "I am hopeful that an agreement among the parties can be reached by March 1.  "If an agreement among the parties can't be reached, I will be prepared to take the steps necessary to bring the permit process to conclusion."  A meeting has been scheduled with Cape Wind's operators, the Department of the Interior, National Park Service and opponents for later this month.  Hopefully a bright light of selfless stewardship can be shone on the participants with a good dose of common sense thrown in for good measure.

These 130 towers would reach 440' above Nantucket Sound in a 25 square mile grid and bring clean renewable power to ~400,000 homes.