3 ms·

Very interesting. I work in the industry and have not heard about this concept. It appears quite a bit of low-TRL work has been done by our friends in Europe an

Very interesting. I work in the industry and have not heard about this concept. It appears quite a bit of low-TRL work has been done by our friends in Europe and Japan. Appears possible in the near future, especially with market pressures due to the popularity and anticipated congestion of LEO. But holy cow, the thruster in their diagram appears to be 80% of the spacecraft volume. These aren't going to be small birds, requiring likely multiple kW to stay in orbit. Thanks for sharing.

_Microft 4y ago
Here is another article that I remember having submitted once: https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Engineering_Technology/World-first_firing_of_air-breathing_electric_thruster https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Engineering_Techn... Edit: since this article mentions "SITAEL" and some authors of the paper submitted here seem to work for "SITAEL" as well, it might be talking about the same thing. I'll keep the comment here anyways.
dr_orpheus 4y ago
Super cool, but yeah it does seem to require a lot of power, more so than some of the existing electric propulsion systems. The T/P of 23 mN/kW is worse than a lot of existing Hall Effect thrusters that get thrust in the range of 50-70 mN/kW. It would be significantly more efficient with an ISP of the air-breathing EP in the ~5000 s range. But with the huge volume (and I assume more mass than existing EP thrusters) its hard to see how overall this would end up being a more efficient system than other electric propulsion systems.