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Blast off into the wild world of plasma rockets! Discover the incredible journey of Franklin Chang Diaz and the VASIMIR engine, a tech that promises Mars trips in just 39 days! Will it fly by 2029, or is it all just hype? Dive in to find out! Subscribe for more space adventures, and let us know in the comments what blew your mind the most! #space #technology #NASA #rockets #Mars
👉 This channel was created in collaboration with https://www.youtube.com/@marschroniken
0:00 - Introduction to VASIMR and Its Promise
1:06 - Franklin Chang Diaz and Ad Astra Origins
3:03 - Plasma Engines vs. Chemical Rockets
4:14 - VASIMR Technology Explained
6:11 - Decades of Development and Funding
8:47 - The Thirty-Nine-Day Mars Claim and Realities
11:14 - Global Plasma Propulsion Race
12:49 - Assessment and Legacy of VASIMR
👉 This channel was created in collaboration with https://www.youtube.com/@marschroniken
0:00 - Introduction to VASIMR and Its Promise
1:06 - Franklin Chang Diaz and Ad Astra Origins
3:03 - Plasma Engines vs. Chemical Rockets
4:14 - VASIMR Technology Explained
6:11 - Decades of Development and Funding
8:47 - The Thirty-Nine-Day Mars Claim and Realities
11:14 - Global Plasma Propulsion Race
12:49 - Assessment and Legacy of VASIMR
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TechTranscript
00:00There is a rocket engine that has been firing repeatedly since 2009
00:05in a vacuum chamber near Houston with up to 200 kilowatts
00:09and an exhaust that's hotter than the surface of the sun.
00:14It was invented by a man who has been to space 7 times himself.
00:20NASA has been paying for it for over 10 years.
00:23A NASA chief promised a flight to Mars in 39 days.
00:27With it and a famous rocket engineer publicly called the whole thing a fraud.
00:34It hasn't flown a single time in 21 years.
00:39Now, for the first time, there's a date.
00:422029, a 150 kilowatt engine from Air Astra is supposed to ignite in Earth's orbit.
00:50What a plasma engine is.
00:52Why?
00:53China, Russia, NASA and half a dozen startups are working on the same idea.
00:59Who's paying for it?
01:00And whether the 39-day Mars trip is just a fantasy, that's what we'll clarify now.
01:06My name is Sir Juan and this is Mars Chronicles.
01:14The astronaut who is building his own engine.
01:18Franklin Chang Diaz, born in 1950 in San Jose, Costa Rica, earned his doctorate in applied plasma physics at MIT
01:27in 1977.
01:30The physics of fusion reactors.
01:33In the same year, he has an idea that never leaves him.
01:37If you can confine plasma with magnetic fields, then you can also use magnetic fields to shoot it out of
01:44a nozzle.
01:47In 1980, NASA selects him as an astronaut.
01:51Between 1986 and 2002, he flies seven times on the space shuttle.
01:57A record that he still shares with Jerry Ross to this day.
02:01On the side, starting in 1993, at the Johnson State Center, he leads a propulsion lab and builds exactly this
02:10engine there.
02:11It's called VASIMIR.
02:13Variable specific impulse magnetoplasma rocket.
02:17More on that in a moment.
02:18In 2005, he leaves NASA, takes the technology with him and starts his own company.
02:25Quite deliberately.
02:27On January 14, 2005, the day the European probe Huygens landed on Saturn's moon Titan.
02:35As a good omen.
02:36The name Ad Astra to the stars is the mission.
02:40And yes, the motto of this channel is also in there.
02:43The main laboratory is located in Webster, Texas.
02:47Six kilometers from the Johnson Space Center.
02:50A second one in Costa Rica.
02:51A former astronaut.
02:53A small team.
02:55An engine unlike anything built before.
02:58You'd better check something like that thoroughly before you invest money in it.
03:02What a plasma engine actually is.
03:06A chemical rocket expels hot gas at 3 to 4.5 kilometers per second out the back.
03:14Lots of thrust, but the chemistry limits the speed.
03:17That's why rockets need so much fuel.
03:20An electric engine turns a gas, usually xenon, into plasma using electricity.
03:26A soup of charged particles and accelerates them with electric or magnetic fields to 20 to 50 kilometers per second.
03:34Ten times faster.
03:36That's why a tenth of the fuel is enough.
03:39The trade-off is low thrust.
03:40The hull engine of a Starlink satellite pushes with 170 millinewtons.
03:47About the weight of 17 grams.
03:50But it runs for months and in space that adds up.
03:54The Soviets flew the first hull thruster in 1971.
03:58Today, NASA's Psyche probe is flying to a metal asteroid with one and every Starlink satellite has one.
04:06Plasma propulsion has long been routine in orbit.
04:10There was an overview in issue 202, which is linked below.
04:14So what does Vesemir do differently?
04:17Three things.
04:18First, there are no electrodes and no grids that slowly get eroded away in the plasma.
04:23The gas, usually argon, flows into a tube.
04:27An antenna ionizes it with radio waves.
04:31A second antenna heats the ions further.
04:33It matches exactly the rhythm at which the particles spiral around the magnetic field lines.
04:39That's called ion-cytotron resonance.
04:42And this is how the plasma reaches over a million degrees.
04:46Secondly, a superconducting magnet holds everything together.
04:51The plasma doesn't touch any wall.
04:54That's why the exhaust can be hotter than any material you could use to build an engine.
05:00In the end, the magnetic field expands like a nozzle and the plasma leaves the engine at up to 50
05:07km per second.
05:09Thirdly, and that's in the name, the specific impulse is variable.
05:14More propellant, ejecting it more slowly, gives more thrust for the departure.
05:19Less propellant, faster, gives more efficiency for the long journey.
05:23A gearbox in space.
05:24The laboratory prototype VX200 delivers about 5 newtons of thrust at 200 kilowatts.
05:33That's about the weight of a half kilogram mass.
05:35At about 5000 seconds of specific impulse and over 70% efficiency.
05:42The remaining 30%, 60 kilowatts, can only be dissipated in a vacuum using huge radiators.
05:50For comparison, the X3 from the University of Michigan, a nested hole thruster, managed 5.4 newtons with 102 kilowatts
06:00in 2017.
06:01A good half a kilogram, so more thrust per kilowatt, but only in short test runs.
06:0721 years of milestones and the calculations to go with them.
06:11The milestones read like a marathon through time.
06:14In 2009, the VVX200 runs at full 200 kilowatts for the first time.
06:21Already in 2008, Ad Astra had agreed with NASA to test a flight version on the International Space Station, ISS.
06:29In 2015, NASA pulled the plug.
06:33The ISS was not an ideal platform for that.
06:35Instead, in August 2015, there was about $9 million for three years and a clear goal to continue construction.
06:44The improved VX200SS was supposed to run for 100 hours straight at 100 kilowatts.
06:51In thermal equilibrium, without anything slowly overheating, it took six years.
06:58In July 2021, the VX200SS ran for 88 hours straight at 80 kilowatts.
07:07A world record for electric propulsion systems in this class.
07:10The test was only stopped because of a faulty sensor on the test bench, 12 hours before the goal.
07:15The full 100 kilowatts were still missing.
07:18The culprit was the coupler that delivers the high-frequency power into the plasma.
07:23Ad Astra calls it Rhino, Rhino Horn, and it overheated.
07:27NASA paid for two more contracts in 2023 for more heat-resistant components and around $850,000 in 2024 for
07:37the fourth generation of this coupler.
07:39In October 2025, the most important step followed.
07:42$4 million for two years to bring three subsystems to flight readiness.
07:49The high-frequency system, the superconducting magnet, and the supporting outer framework.
07:54On the NASA scale of technology readiness, or TRL for short, they are supposed to reach levels 5 and 6.
08:00And 6 means flight-ready.
08:03That's what the VF150 program is for.
08:06Two almost identical engines, each with 150 kilowatts.
08:11The first one is a Pathfinder and is supposed to be finished in 2028.
08:15The second one has been under construction since mid-2026 and is supposed to be the first to fly in
08:21orbit in 2029.
08:23And the money?
08:24The amazing thing is how little funding has come in.
08:26$9 million in 2015.
08:28Two more contracts in 2023.
08:30Just under $1 million in 2024.
08:33And $4 million in 2025.
08:36For a nuclear ship, SR-1 Freedom, NASA on the other hand, estimates around $2 billion.
08:43So $2,000 million.
08:45The rest is covered by private shareholders.
08:48In 2023, the Canadian high-frequency specialist Athera joined in.
08:53They build the transmitter amplifiers and the subsidiary in Costa Rica also profits from green hydrogen.
08:59The US Congressman Brian Babin called it a small but dedicated team in 2021.
09:05A couple dozen people for something that other countries assign entire institutes to.
09:12The 39 days.
09:13And now to the sentence that made Vazimir famous and at the same time unbelievable.
09:20In 2010, NASA chief Charles Bolden said,
09:23With this technology, a Mars mission could shrink from two and a half years to five months.
09:29And Ad Astra calculated the outbound trip at 39 days.
09:34The calculation is calculation.
09:37It just has a footnote.
09:38You need a nuclear reactor with 200 megawatts and a power-to-weight ratio of 1,000 watts per kilogram.
09:47The most powerful reactor ever flown in space, the Soviet Topaz, had 10 kilowatts and 10 watts per kilogram.
09:55The reactor that NASA is planning for the end of 2028 on SR-1 freedom.
10:01We linked it below.
10:03In issue 258 provides 20 kilowatts, one ten-thousandth of what would be needed for the 39 days.
10:12Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society, called it a hoax in 2011 under the title the Vazimir hoax.
10:20Ion engines, he wrote, have been running for decades with 70% efficiency, thousands of hours in space.
10:27Vazimir back then had 50% efficiency in runs lasting only seconds.
10:35Ad Astra has since addressed two of his three points.
10:38The third one, the reactor, remains the problem.
10:41That's why, since the end of 2020, there's been an alliance with Space Nuclear Power Corporation.
10:48The company behind the Kilopower reactor, which in 2018 delivered 1 kilowatt during testing.
10:55The goal is reactors starting at 100 kilowatts.
10:59A flight demonstration by the end of the decade.
11:01And a nuclear electric freighter, which, according to the partners,
11:05is supposed to reduce a round trip to Mars of over a year to just a few months.
11:09That's also the market that Ad Astra itself is now targeting.
11:14Logistics between Earth and Moon, tax and supplies.
11:18Less sexy than 39 days.
11:21But for the first time, the promise matches the hardware.
11:25Who else is working on plasma?
11:27While Ad Astra is improving runtime and power output, the niche has turned into a race.
11:33China showcased a magnetoplasma dynamic thruster at the Xi'an Aerospace Propulsion Institute in March 2025.
11:39A magnetoplasma dynamic thruster with 100 kilowatts running at full power.
11:46Russia was a month ahead.
11:48Rosatom's Institute in Toitsk presented a laboratory prototype with 300 kilowatts of pulsed operation
11:54and at least six newtons of thrust.
11:58That's about 0.6 kilograms of force.
12:01A flight model is expected to be ready around 2030.
12:05There too, they say Mars in 30 to 60 days.
12:09And there too, the reactor is missing.
12:12NASA remains pragmatic.
12:15SR-1 Freedom gets seven proven Hall thrusters.
12:19Plus the startups.
12:21Pulsar Fusion in England ignited the first plasma in its fusion drive Sunbird in March 2026.
12:27With Krypton.
12:28And still without any fusion.
12:30And wants to test the underlying technology behind it in orbit in 2027.
12:35And since we're based in Austria, one point of pride and Polschen from Wiener Neustadt
12:40has over 250 electric drives in orbit.
12:44Together more than 420 years of operation.
12:48The only question is, who will be the first to bring the 100 kilowatt class into space?
12:55A quick note on our own behalf.
12:57If you got something out of this episode, hit the hype button.
13:00A click that really helps the video with the algorithm.
13:03And if you want to support the channel long term, you'll find the channel membership right below the video.
13:09Honest assessment.
13:11My honest evaluation, clearly marked as my opinion.
13:14Wasimir is not a Mirage.
13:17But it's also not the drive it was sold as for 20 years.
13:22The physics are proven.
13:24The 88 hours are a real achievement.
13:27But Hall thrusters are now mass produced.
13:30NASA uses them to fly to Mars.
13:32And the X3 shows that they too are moving into the 100 kilowatt class.
13:38Wasimir's trump card remains scalability.
13:41A single engine without wear parts that can be scaled up toward a megawatt.
13:46Instead of mounting 30 engines side by side.
13:50Ad Astra can only play this trump card once someone provides the megawatts.
13:55And this reactor isn't in any budget in the world.
13:58I believe that the VF150 will be built.
14:03Whether it will fly in 2029, I doubt it.
14:082031 wouldn't be a surprise.
14:10And I also believe that China or NASA with a Hall thruster in the 100 kilowatt class
14:16will be in orbit sooner than the plasma engine from Houston.
14:20That doesn't diminish the achievements of Franklin Chang Diaz.
14:23A man flew the shuttle seven times.
14:26Then he dedicated his life to an idea and brought it to the brink of flight readiness
14:30with just a fraction of a NASA budget.
14:33Per Aspera Ad Astra is not just the motto at this company.
14:37It's the business plan.
14:39My name is Sirvan and that was Mars Chronicles.
14:42Thank you for tuning in.
14:43Per Aspera Ad Astra.