Reply To: Great News!

[Ivy Matt]

NASA has announced partnerships with 12 companies “to advance concept studies and technology development projects in the areas of advanced propulsion, habitation and small satellites.” Three of those companies (including MSNW LLC) will be developing propulsion technologies:

Selected advanced electric propulsion projects will develop propulsion technology systems in the 50- to 300-kilowatt range to meet the needs of a variety of deep space mission concepts. State-of-the-art electric propulsion technology currently employed by NASA generates less than five kilowatts, and systems being developed for the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) Broad Area Announcement (BAA) are in the 40-kilowatt range.

The three NextSTEP advanced propulsion projects, $400,000 to $3.5 million per year per award, will have no more than a three-year performance period focused on ground testing efforts. The selected companies are:

Ad Astra Rocket Company of Webster, Texas
Aeroject Rocketdyne Inc. of Redmond, Washington
MSNW LLC of Redmond, Washington

It doesn’t specify MSNW’s propulsion technology. They have publicly revealed three: the Electrodeless Lorenz Force (ELF) thruster, the Electromagnetic Plasmoid Thruster (EMPT), and the Fusion Driven Rocket (FDR). All three are field-reversed configuration (FRC) plasma technologies, but only the latter involves fusion. The Fusion Driven Rocket was funded through the NASA NIAC program, so it’s possible the NextSTEP project is a continuation of that project. However, as far as I am aware MSNW has not published “Experimental demonstration of fusion gain with inductively driven metal liners” or a similarly-titled paper, so who knows what they’re up to? The ELF thruster is supposed to be able to use the Martian atmosphere as a propellant, so it’s possible MSNW is being tapped to develop an engine for a landing vehicle, rather than a space thruster.