Princeton's magnetic reconnection drive

Dr Fatima Ebrahimi, who's earned her honorific unlike some, proposes a rocket thruster. This one pushes out its propellant by magnetic recombination. That would be "An Alfvenic reconnecting plasmoid thruster" now doi 10.1017/S0022377820001476.

Ebrahimi works in the dead-end of fusion energy creation but, here, has found a spinoff. Note: despite that she came out of fusion research, her drive doesn't seem to be fusing its propellant itself. This is a better ion drive. Ebrahimi is a high-energy VASIMR, basically; for which, Ad Astra last January ran a prototype at 120 kW. So the Ebrahimi Drive is not to be confused with Princeton's Direct Fusion (also lagging on prototypes).

By magnetic recombination rather than steady magnetism, she promises higher thrust in addition to standard iondrive efficiency. This is great for pushing out of gravity-wells in a reasonable time. Right now the ion drives only work properly in deep space where you don't need high initial thrust, so may work mainly with I_SP pushing faster gradually.

Specifically Ebrahimi promises I_SP 2,000 to 50,000 s, power from 0.1 to 10 MW and thrust from 1 to 100 Newtons. Still, I think, a design for pushing small robotic probes, not for getting Schwarzenegger's ass to Mars.

And we still need the power, more so if we're talking about megawatts, which looks to me something between a big rig diesel lorry and a small nuclear submarine. Luckily, frontloading the thrust near high orbits will allow solar-power redirection and focusing.

IMPLEMENTATION 1/30: Stationkeeping, SVL2.

PROPELLANT 9/4: As with NTR, so VASIMR - I say "propellant", not "fuel". So why not ammonia? Answer: it's that "plasmoid" in the title. They're ions driven by magnetism, not (relatively) inert molecules driven by heat. Ebrahimi notes that the mass of the ion doesn't matter: she's looking at deuterium or helium, like Jupiter missions expect, but classically argon and krypton get used close to home. So far, over Venus for stationkeeping, this blog is assuming hydrogen on account it's a 584-day mission.