July 2, 2009 – Ad Astra Rocket Company has successfully demonstrated operation of its VX-200 plasma engine first stage at full power and under superconducting conditions in tests conducted today at ...

We’ve been talking about going to Mars for decades, but we haven’t yet cracked how to get people there and back safely and in a reasonable amount of time. The problem is one of distance and the ...

Russia's state atomic energy corporation, Rosatom, has developed a plasma electric rocket engine that could send spacecraft to Mars in just 30 to 60 days. The plasma engine works by accelerating ...

A peer-reviewed study modeling Mars transit times for chemical propulsion rockets found that even optimized Starship-class trajectories would still require roughly three months to reach the Red Planet ...

A breakthrough pulsed plasma rocket is getting NASA phase 2 innovative concepts funding. It will have 15 times the efficiency of chemical rockets and with high levels of thrust at the level of a ...

A plasma rocket engine that may one day get a test on the International Space Station has reached a power milestone in one of the radio-frequency (RF) systems used to heat the electrically charged ...

Houston, TX. Ad Astra Rocket Company’s VASIMR(R) VX-200 rocket prototype reached its highly- coveted 200 kW maximum power milestone at 11:59 am (CST) in tests conducted at the company’s Houston ...

The coming decades of space exploration hinge on a single, stubborn number: the 225 million kilometres between Earth and Mars ...

FORGET fuel-powered jet engines. We’re on the verge of having aircraft that can fly from the ground up to the edge of space using air and electricity alone. Traditional jet engines create thrust by ...

The long, winding road for Franklin Chang-Diaz's plasma rocket engine takes another turn. See full article ...

At one point, VASIMR actually was supposed to be installed on the ISS for station keeping. It would have significantly reduced the amount of propellant needed to be sent up for that purpose, while at ...