How far can we go with chemical rockets?

24:46And it's pushing water out the back, out of the tank. That's a rocket-powered paddle boat that we could legitimately build. And then you could say, yes, I've been on a rocket. Okay, but this is like the least exciting rocket history has ever created. Like, boo. Boo to this rocket. All right. Well, that's the principle, though, behind the other technology we're going to talk about today. Instead of chemical rockets, where you have the fuel that gives you the energy, though very inefficiently, and the propellant, which requires huge, massive tanks to go anywhere, We're going to talk about ion thrusters, which separate this question of propellant, the mass you're throwing out the back, and the energy source.

25:26In the same way that Kelly pumping the water out the back of the boat separates the energy source from the water. You're not getting the energy from the water. The water is totally inert, right? Sure. So ion thruster is the approach we're going to talk about today, and it solves the energy and mass problems separately. First, we're going to talk about the mass, and then we'll talk about the energy. and they're called ion thrusters because they use ions. An ion is just an atom that's not neutral. So if you take, for example, xenon, it's got a bunch of electrons in it, which balance out the protons in the nucleus.

25:57And then if you strip some of those electrons away, then you have an ion. So now it has a positive charge. And that's useful because you can then accelerate it in electromagnetic fields, right? So if you have a bunch of xenon and you strip away some of the electrons, now they have a charge in them. If you can build an electromagnetic field, it will accelerate those ions. Shoot those ions out the back of your ship, and it's the ionic equivalent of Kelly's water rocket, right? Just shoot them at the back. They carry momentum with them because you have high velocity now, and that's a rocket. Okay, that sounds cooler.

26:37If you're bringing ionized gas, does this help you cut down on weight because gas weighs less than propellant or not really? Because once you compress the gas, it gets heavy. What's the deal here? No, it really does help you cut down on weight because you're going to be more efficient about the energy. One of the things about chemical rockets is that they're trying to solve both problems at the same time. Energy and mass and the energy extracted via combustion is very inefficient. And so here, if we can, let's ignore the energy question for now and imagine we have some energy source to fund our electromagnetic fields.

27:11Now, if we have some energy source, we can very efficiently use that to accelerate our ions to very, very high speeds. And so we can get much more push per unit of propellant, right? Because the mass can go to higher velocities. So it sounded impressive earlier when we said like three kilometers per second for the propellant from a chemical rocket. That's cool. But ion thrusters can get much higher velocities. And so for every pound of propellant that we bring along, we can now get much more push. And this is what rocket folks talk about as specific impulse. If you start reading about rockets, you get into all these weird terms, but it's just a bunch of fancy terms to cloud some basic physics, which is you want as much momentum change per mass.

27:56So remember, momentum is mass times velocity. If you're bringing rocks or water or xenon or whatever to throw at the back, you want as much velocity in every kilogram you throw at the back because momentum is mass times velocity. And so for a fixed mass, you want the most velocity to get the most momentum. And so if you can get these things to higher speeds, which ion thrusters can do better than chemical rockets can do, then you can get more momentum per unit mass that you're bringing. My gut would not have guessed that pushing an ion would get things out the back faster than exploding propellants.

28:32Cool. Well, physics is more powerful than chemistry, Kelly. And we're using electromagnetic fields here, right? And so if you have enough energy, and this whole thing hinges on having enough energy, which we haven't talked about at all yet, but if you have an energy source, then you can accelerate these ions to very high speeds. Here on Earth, we accelerate protons, which are just hydrogen ions, to nearly the speed of light. Enormous amounts of momentum in the collisions at the Large Hadron Collider, for example. So this all sounds great so far. We're talking about a lot of momentum created for every ion.

29:05The issue is that it's hard to scale up. So we have a small amount of mass in general, which means a small momentum change. So while for each ion, we can get each one to high velocity, which means that per pound of xenon we're bringing, we're getting a lot more momentum change than per pound of methyl ox or hydro ox or whatever fuel a chemical rocket is burning. It's a real challenge to get a lot of kilograms out the back to get a huge thrust. Okay. And so instead of like a big hot burn that gives you a lot of thrust all at once, an ion rocket tends to have a slow, gentle, long thrust. So, for example, it might take like two days for an ion rocket to get you up to even like highway speeds.

29:50Whereas a chemical rocket is going to be like, kaboom, we're going pretty fast. But then it's all spent. Okay. But so does that mean ion thrusters can't get you out of Earth's gravity well? That's exactly right. Ion thrusters, as currently designed, can't get you off of Earth because they're very, very gentle thrust. But they can burn for a very, very long time. And they're very efficient. And they can travel with a small amount of mass. The amount of mass you need to get to Mars, for example, is like thousands of kilograms of xenon, which compares to like a thousand tons of chemical fuel. So it's a huge difference.

30:25Your whole ship is much lighter. And then that's not as hard to get into orbit, right? Even if it's a factor of 25 to get something into orbit from Earth, you need to use chemical fuel to do that. Now it's a factor of 25 times 1 ,000 kilograms instead of 1 ,000 tons. So it takes much less chemical fuel to get an ion rocket into space with the fuel it needs to get to Mars than chemical fuel to get a chemical rocket into space. Okay. But we'd still have to use a chemical rocket to get the ion rocket to space, and then you use the ion rocket to get to where you're going. Yeah, exactly. Unless you can build these things in space with Jeff Bezos's future space-based economy from asteroids or whatever, right?

31:09So this isn't the complete solution. It's not like, you know, we're building warp drives or teleportation portals to get to Alpha Centauri, you know, in your living room or something. But this will allow us to get further out into the solar system and even past the solar system once we can get out of Earth's orbit. So you mentioned it takes two days to reach highway speed. Do you eventually reach high enough speeds that a trip to Mars wouldn't take like five billion years? Yes, absolutely. And NASA is building exactly this kind of rocket. We're hoping to use it to go to Mars in 2028. It's called SR Freedom.

31:43And I'll tell you all about that trajectory. Once we're done talking about the energy source of these things, which is really important. All right. Where do we get the energy? So there's a long history, actually, of ion thrusters, which I think is interesting. and it traces sort of the different sources of energy. People start talking about these things back in like 1911. And there's a few different approaches for how to build it and then how to power it. The approaches for how to build it are things like a gridded ion thruster. Basically, you just have like an anode and a cathode. You know, you have one thing with a positive charge, one thing with a negative charge.

32:14You put your charged particles in it. They get attracted to the opposite side. They go fast. They zoom out the side. So it's a grid because there are holes in it for the particles to go through. So imagine like two chain link fences. One is positive, one is negative. You drop a positive particle into there, it accelerates towards the negative one, and then shoots through the gaps and out the back. That's the basic principle. Okay. But so to make the anode and the cathode, do you just like stick magnets on there? Or do you need like a battery to make that happen? You need energy. Yeah, you need electricity.

32:45Magnets can't do that for you. Okay. Also, that design isn't great because it corrodes. you're shooting particles at the chain link fence, which tends to eventually destroy the chain link fence or it gets jammed up or something. So these days they have even fancier ones. It's something called a Hall effect thruster, which doesn't have the actual cathode. It has a virtual cathode. You have a magnetic field there, which traps electrons. So they move in circles and they ionize the gas, which they collide into. So there's sort of like a electric mixing spoon that breaks up the gas into ions. And then you don't actually have a cathode there.

33:20The electrons there act as the cathode. And so there's nothing to get corroded or broken down. So that's the technology. But in every case, the limit is the energy source. If you want to crank up ion thrusters to give you a real amount of thrust, then you need a lot of energy. And so the first example of an ion thruster I want to talk about is called the SIRT-1. This is back in 1964. this was a test by NASA and it was basically like hey does this work at all and it was up in space for 30 minutes and it worked and it was powered by chemical batteries so these were like zinc silver oxide batteries and it wasn't a whole lot of energy it was like 1.7 kilowatts of energy but you know it didn't go for very long so they didn't even like try solar panels though a later version of a SIRT 2 did have solar panels but this was like hey, all the equations match.

34:13Does it actually work in practice? And it did. So that's cool. Very cool. Well, I've never heard of it, which is a bummer. Oh, yeah. It's pretty cute. It's just like a little ball. And then people said, all right, well, let's try to go for longer periods. And let's avoid using batteries. And let's use solar power. And this is really exciting because now you're not carrying the energy with you at all. Then it's not a rocket. No, it's a rocket if you're carrying the propellant. So you still have to carry the mass you're throwing at the back, but it's not a requirement that you bring the energy with you, right?

34:46All right, all right. So if you can just beam the energy to the rocket and you can use that, then that's awesome. So they tried this. The first one is called N-Star, which has 2.3 kilowatts of solar power. So these solar arrays generate the electrical power, which then you use to build electric fields to shoot ionized xenon out the back at really high speeds. Wow. And this thing ran for 16 ,000 hours and used only 80 kilograms of xenon propellant to get pretty good delta-V. It was like 4.3 kilometers per second. So it was a good demonstration of these things running for a long time, which is what we need to get to Alpha Centauri or get even to the edges of the solar system.

35:32The next step up is the DART mission. I don't know if people remember this. this is the one that went and visited an asteroid and i think it dropped like a washing machine size block of metal on the asteroid just like see like what happens yeah well wasn't it also to see i mean it was to see what happens but it was to see what happens in the hopes that if there's ever an asteroid coming towards us we would have some information about how hard you'd have to like hit it to try to deflect it from the earth or something right it was more than just see what happens oh no, you're right. I'm actually thinking of the Hayabusa mission that dropped a huge metallic payload as an impactor onto the asteroid Ryugu.

36:10But DART is different. You're right. DART was there to like, let's practice deflecting an asteroid. So it does something else. So DART's main propulsion was a chemical rocket, but it also had an ion thruster for testing, which is very cool. Well, and didn't Hayabusa bring back a sample from the asteroid? Didn't it like it made an explosion to collect something. I feel like you're being uncharacteristically negative and I'm being uncharacteristically positive this time. No, no, that's totally positive. I love the idea of dropping a washing machine sized piece of metal on an asteroid just to see what happens.

36:42Like that's fantastic. I'm super curious. Like I love when that mission went up. Total supporter. My tax dollars should definitely be spent on missions like that. Okay. Yes. Might as well. Okay. So we have gotten to the asteroids with ion thrusters. Yeah, exactly. And so this one also used sunlight. Electricity from solar panels was used to accelerate xenon atoms. The ion engine was not the primary propulsion system for the impact. It was mainly a flight demonstration of this next technology for future deep space missions. And ion thrusters are all over the place. Like China's space station has ion thrusters, which it uses to adjust and maintain orbit.

37:21Starlink uses ion thrusters that have krypton or argon in them. They're good for very gentle little pushes to maintain where you are, not a quick, like, ooh, I'm going to hit something. I really got to get out of here. Also, stuff out in space tries to avoid using thrusters whenever possible because it uses up propellant. For example, Hubble or the space telescopes, they try to do all of their adjustments using reaction wheels. You want to turn the thing. You have internal reaction wheels that store angular momentum so you can turn without any thrusters. We can talk about that on another episode.

37:54Because every time you're using a thruster, it's a rocket. You have propellant. You're using it up. And so eventually it will run out. But the real question is like, what is the best way to get energy? We've talked about chemical batteries. That was always just going to be a test. Solar power is cool, right? Because it's up. It's free. It's out there. You don't even need to bring the energy with you. That's very cool. The problem is with solar power is that it drops off really hard with distance. The intensity of sunlight goes like one over the distance squared. So if you're twice as far from the sun, you get one fourth the energy and space is big.

38:31And so by the time you're like out by Jupiter, there's almost no usable solar power, especially to power a rocket. So we need something else. We need a low mass source of energy. Physics is what we need. And when we get back, we're going to hear about how physics is going to get us out to Jupiter. Yeah.

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41:40All right, Daniel, how is physics going to get us to Jupiter? Yeah, physics is absolutely the solution here. And so, of course, the better way to make energy is not by burning coal or burning methane or even by solar power, because that's not available out in the outer reaches of the solar system. It's nuclear power, right? We already know that the amount of energy stored in like a kilogram of uranium is huge compared to what you could get from a kilogram of methane, right? Brandon Monroe has this amazing comic where he shows like the energy density of like uranium versus coal versus wood or whatever.

42:18And it's just off the charts. You know, it's like even on a log scale, it's just insane. And so if you want a bunch of energy and you don't want to carry a bunch of mass around, this is the way to go. have a fission reactor. So bring a small amount of uranium, use that to power your nuclear reactor. Your nuclear reactor produces electricity. You feed that into your ion thruster. And now you have propellant, which is very effective because you're pushing it up to very high velocities. And you have fuel, uranium, which is very low mass. You're getting a lot of energy out of it per kilogram. I'm going to look past the fact that you mentioned the competition on this show.

42:58No, I'm just kidding. We love XKCD. It's not a competition. It's good for everybody. And anyway, nobody's in competition with Randall because he wins. He does win. He does. And he's a lovely human being also. Yeah, he really is genuinely a nice guy. Yeah. Okay. All right. So we've decided that nuclear powered ion thrusters are the way to go. Have we had any nuclear powered ion thrusters in space? I know we've had little nuclear reactors in space to power satellites. So it depends on what you mean by we. The United States hasn't. By we, I mean humanity. Well, then the Soviets have done that. The Soviets in 1987 had a nuclear-powered plasma thruster in orbit.

43:41So this has definitely happened. It's worked before. And the U.S., as I'm sure you know, has operated nuclear fission reactors in space. So all the pieces are there. We know ion thrusters work in space when they have an electrical energy source. We've powered nuclear fission reactors in space, and the Soviets even put them together in 87 to use nuclear-powered ion thrusters. Wow. Yeah. And all the pieces are still there because I think our attempt is still in orbit somewhere because it didn't quite go according to plan. Exactly. And so NASA was already building fission reactors to operate in space as part of the Lunar Gateway Space Station, which was then canceled.

44:21But they had a power and propulsion element being built by Lanteris Space Systems, and they were already building those. And so we're going to take those and put them at the end of a very, very long truss to keep the radiation away from like the electronics of the rest of the ship. And that's going to provide power for the new SR-1 Freedom, which is going to power a mission to Mars in 2028. Nuclear powered ion thrusters to Mars. Whoa. OK. All right. I feel like you're still going to need the chemical rocket to leave Earth. But now you're carrying with you a nuclear reactor. Yes. What is our plan for making sure that everything stays safe?

45:04Cross our fingers, rely on engineers. There's not a great plan. Like, this is an issue. It's always going to be an issue. Things go boom when you launch them. And so if you're launching radioactive fuel into space, it's always a danger. There's not some way that you can, like, keep it clad in something that's less likely to go boom and then open it up and let the reactions start happening once you're in space and away from. Earth. There's no way. I feel like there's got to be ways to make this less scary. So there are smart folks working on this. And of course, they're taking whatever precaution they can.

45:38One thing you can do is don't turn on the reactor until you get to space, for example. So there's still a risk because you have uranium fuel in there, which is radioactive, but you don't have like dangerous nuclear byproducts being produced or already present on the rocket so that if it does go boom, you're spreading some uranium fuel, which is not good, right? But it's not as bad as spreading like really toxic radioactive nuclear byproducts. Okay. In addition, like, you know, they're putting this thing inside highly durable, heat resistant containment materials designed to survive extreme launch vehicle explosions.

46:15And it's supposed to be like subcritical no matter what, even if the launch fails. So they're doing what they can. And I have not dug into the details here, But I trust the engineers are doing their best to solve this problem. And I totally acknowledge that it's very dangerous to be launching nasty, toxic stuff into space because it might not get there. All right. Thank you for giving me my daily dose of Kelly being able to worry and be a wet blanket. And all right, what do we need to think about next? So the way this thing works is it's a fission reactor, which means you're taking uranium and you're splitting it.

46:46And that causes a chain reaction because it produces neutrons. And those neutrons split other uranium atoms. and along the way it produces heat. And then how do you turn that heat into electricity? Well, on Earth, we often do something like boil water, right? And use the steam to spin a turbine. And so up in space, we're doing something only a little bit more sophisticated. Instead of water, we're using a helium-neon mixture, which still spins a turbine and creates electricity. So the basic process is the same. And then we can use that electricity to accelerate the ions. The cool thing is the fuel is very, very low in mass.

47:23Remember, the propellant is like thousands of kilograms of xenon, which is still really low mass compared to the thousands of tons you need for chemical rockets. But the uranium fuel, to give you the energy to push that out the back, is just like 10 kilograms. It's like a rounding error. That's how powerful uranium is. It's really amazing. So it's almost as free as sunlight, but you can keep using it when you get past Jupiter. Why? Why haven't we done this already then? This seems pretty obviously better. Is it because of concerns about like, where are you going to get the uranium? Yeah. Why haven't we done this already?

47:59Well, you know, the Soviets have been doing it since the 80s. But chemical rockets are easier, right? There's no nuclear power issues and they can get off of Earth. So this is really only useful for exploring in places where you're not fighting a big gravity well. Okay. Got it. And it gives a pretty different signature for your mission. Like for a chemical rocket, you want to get to Mars. You burn for like 10 minutes, and then you travel to Mars for six to nine months, and you're going at like peak velocity almost all the time, like 33 kilometers per second. An ion rocket is going to give you like a year of continuous burn, and it's going to start very, very slow.

48:36It's going to eventually get up to the same peak velocity, 30, 35 kilometers per second, but it's not in free fall, right? It's a continuous thrust, and it can be adjusted in flight. And so it's a very different kind of trajectory. And that makes it less sensitive to the timing. So you can't get to Mars when it's on the other side of the sun. But because you're not just in free fall, you can do all sorts of different kinds of trajectories. So you don't have as narrow a window. So it takes a little longer to get there, like a year instead of six to nine months. But you have more flexibility about when you go.

49:12I don't think I understand the you're not in free fall thing. Why would a chemical rocket versus an ion thing, if you had enough chemicals for your chemical rocket, couldn't you have the same flexibility? In principle, if you brought enough fuel along that you were burning it during the flight, then yes, you could do the same thing with a chemical rocket. But then you need even more fuel. Remember, chemical rockets are very, very inefficient. That's why they like to burn it all at the very, very beginning. And it's basically, it's almost like a cannonball launch, right? A cannonball, you give it one push and then it just flies.

49:46chemical rocket, it's like 10 minutes of pushing, and then it's just a free fall trajectory. And so you're very limited in how you go from one place to the other if you can't burn along the way. So the ion thruster can do that. It takes longer to get up to high speed. So the whole trip is going to be a year. The plus side is you have a little bit more flexibility. So your window is a bit broader. It's still not like we can go to Mars anytime and you can't get to Mars faster, but there's a little bit more flexibility there. Okay. I mean, that's pretty cool because needing to wait two years for every launch window, like, yeah, I mean, you missed that.

50:20Now you're waiting two years. Like that's a real pain in the rear end. How much do ion thrusters open this window? So chemical rockets have like a few weeks of a window when they can effectively get to Mars and ion thrusters have like a few months. So it's a meaningful change. Again, it's not like totally solving the problem. It's not like you can go to Mars on a whim, but there is flexibility there. Well, but you could imagine a few weeks of bad weather totally messing up your Mars plans if that bad weather happens during your window, but like probably not gonna have a couple months of bad weather.

50:52So like that makes your probability of getting to Mars. I don't know. I think much higher. Yeah, exactly. Look at me being a ray of sunshine. And so, for example, if your launch is like delayed by 90 days, the spacecraft just like adjusts the thrust profile, burns more propellant to catch up to Mars rather than having to scrub the mission entirely. And adding a little bit more propellant is not disastrous because the propellant is fairly low mass here. We're talking about like a few more kilograms of xenon, right? And the energy is very, very dense. So we don't have this rocket equation trap where we fall into where every time we bring a pound more fuel, now we need thousands more pounds of fuel to push that fuel.

51:33And we still got to launch this thing up into space, but remember the fact that it's lower mass means it's cheaper to launch it into orbit in the beginning. And we're going to do this in like 2028. It's just around the corner. SR-1 Freedom is going to go to Mars. It's going to drop three helicopters that land themselves on Mars, which is amazing given Mars has a very dilute atmosphere and helicopters have a real challenge to navigate there. And then it's going to keep going. It's just going to keep going and explore. I love that when we just like send something out into space. And because it has an ion thruster, it can go for a while.

52:09Where's it going next? So the final target isn't specified, but the idea is explore the outer solar system, including high-powered missions beyond Jupiter. Wow. So they're still figuring it out. But we have flexibility because we're not just limited to narrow launch windows. I also want to give a shout out to the listener who commented on gravitational slingshots, which are another way that NASA has historically used to explore the outer solar system without bringing a lot of propellant. How do you change your direction without any fuel? Gravitational slingshots are super duper cool, but they also take forever.

52:45You need everything to be in the oriented and exactly the right place. So sometimes you do two or three swings around things. It could take 10 years to gravitationally slingshot your way from one place to another. So ion thrusters are a much more direct way to get there. I think Kim Stanley Robinson used gravity slingshots as a really great plot point in Aurora, where they were running out of fuel. So everybody had to go into hibernation and they used gravity slingshots to get you there. It takes a long time. But if you don't have fuel and you can use that, if you've got the time, it's a good way to go.

53:19Yeah, it's also cool because it's physics again, right? Which inherently makes it awesome. Yeah, better than chemistry, not as good as biology, but it's a hierarchy. It's okay. And there are other side benefits, like if we can get reactors to work in space, maybe that's going to help us figure out how to get reactors to work in crazy environments like on the moon. And people who are talking about building moon bases are talking about powering those things with nuclear reactors. Getting to Mars, it's going to help us open up more launch windows. It's a good way to send cargo to Mars. And it opens up the outer solar system.

53:51Remember, solar power is just not useful past Jupiter, which gets like 4 % of the Earth's sunlight. So if we're going to explore the outer reaches of the solar system, it's not going to be with chemical rockets. It's going to be with ion thrusters. So if we wanted to get like straight to Jupiter really fast, we'd want ion thrusters powered with nuclear reactors rather than gravity slingshots. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, cool. And what did Voyager use? Voyager is a gravity slingshot situation, right? Yes, exactly. Okay. Well, this is amazing. I can't wait to see how those helicopters fare in the Martian atmosphere like the helicopter that came before.

54:29I can't wait to see if Kelly ever achieves her lifelong dream of sitting on a rocket. Yeah, well, I hope you're sitting right behind me, Daniel. And I hope it's a safe rocket like our paddleboat rocket and not a chemical rocket. Well, I look forward to sitting on that rocket with you, Kelly. Until then, thank you, everybody, for taking this journey with us through the history of rocket development and into the future for how humans could explore the solar system. Yay, space exploration. Until next time.

55:04Thanks, everybody, for listening. Please go and do us a favor and rate the show on whatever podcast app you're using. It really helps people find us. Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is edited by the amazing Matt Kesselman he really is a wizard you can also find us online on Blue Sky, Instagram and xDNKUniverse come engage with us you can email us at questions at danielandkelly.org we really do want to hear from you and you can find our website www.danielandkelly.org where you'll also find an invitation to join our discord where everybody comes and talks about the amazing universe. And we also have the most amazing moderators.

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