Energy efficiency is not just for appliances and vehicles on Earth—spacecraft that conserve fuel can provide a boost to humanity, too. In a recent article for  Scientific American,  Damon Landau and Nathan J. Strange of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory described how a resuable, fuel-efficient craft would enable unprecedented voyages beyond Earth's neighborhood. In the video below, Landau and Strange lay out the essentials of their proposal.

5 Comments

1. 1. lump1 07:36 PM 11/29/11

   I think this is exactly right. It makes me sad that the ISS, which cost a hundred billion dollars, is just gonna be allowed to crash to Earth. Why *aren't* we considering a plan to spiral that thing out of Earth's gravity well? Even if it just ends up being scrap for some future mission, at least it's already in space, so the really expensive step is done. Getting it to higher orbits could be done very slowly; it's the perfect kind of task for low-thrust electric propulsion. I'm sure that we could calculate some very cheap low-energy path to slowly get it from Earth to Mars using nothing but gravity assists, and by the time it comes back, we might actually want to put astronauts into it for the next trip out. But even if not, having a big, inhabitable ship in deep space would be wonderfully useful.

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2. 2. timbosta 09:26 AM 11/30/11

   Equipping the ISS with Hall thrusters and then nudging it towards Mars? Hmmm. It has to be a good idea to at least shunt it to a higher orbit or out of the well altogether, say, park it at one of the Moon's Langrangian points, make it more robust, and then use Falcon X to access it. use it as a facility to build a proper deep space ship with enough reaction mass to develop a decent specific impulse. Send that ship to Mars, and use Blue Origin's launch vehicle to transfer to and from Mars orbit.

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3. 3. benwade 11:41 AM 11/30/11

   I agree with you guys. I think an earth-lagrange point would be best, but let's go to change.org and start a petition to get this done. If no-one else wants to do it, I will. Please let me know if you would sign the petition. email me at pers-557185457 AT-SIGN mailinator DOT com with your email and I will email you the petition link.
   
   Thanks, Ben

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4. 4. D.Russnak 02:24 PM 12/1/11

   Ion drives aren't really a new concept... Just saying...

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5. 5. jimfromcanada 09:36 PM 12/2/11

   As attractive as elevating the ISS to a Lagrangian point or a high earth orbit sounds, the ISS is not designed to be habitable at those locations. The high levels of radiation above the earth's magnetic field would mean the crew would have to spend all their time in a shielded "refuge" compartment. If such a module were attached to the ISS that used the systems of the ISS to support it, it might be feasible. However that depends on the electronic and other systems being hardened against such radiation levels as well.
   The other problem with spending long periods of time in orbit, the effect of zero gravity, can only be addressed by providing some kind of artificial gravity perhaps from the centripetal force of a rotating crew capsule. This sounds hard to accomodate with the configuraltion of the ISS. This does not mean that it could not be some kind of waystation to store supplies, fuel, O2 water,etc.

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