LIBERIA, Guanacaste – Astronaut and rocket scientist Franklin Chang told The Tico Times yesterday that he and his lab tech crew just took one step closer to the lab's goal of putting into flight an innovative new technology: a plasma space rocket.
The space rocket, which is being designed here at Chang's Ad Astra Rocket Lab on rolling green farmland just outside Guanacaste's capital, would have an array of uses in space – from powering the space equivalent of tugboats that would fix busted satellites, to a more cost-efficient rocket for the earth-orbiting International Space Station, to powering faster and more cost-efficient trips to Mars.
On Monday, the lab crew got their model plasma generator to operate for a milestone three hours, a major gain considering that the longest steady state operation the generator had reached before was two minutes.
Chang, who shares the world record for the most space missions at seven, told The Tico Times that the model plasma generator designs will be used to build a complete plasma rocket engine prototype in the company's sister lab in Houston, Texas, by the beginning of next year. Chang hopes to put his plasma rockets into space by 2010.
“We've taken a major step forward in achieving this goal,” Chang said.
Plasma, dubbed the fourth state of matter, is electrically charged elements at extremely high temperatures at which no compounds hold, as in the center of the Sun. Ad Astra has figured out a way to harness plasma using magnetic fields.
See upcoming editions of The Tico Times for more of our exclusive interview with Chang. |
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