NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center awards contract to Reisz Engineers

A contract to investigate technology for deep space missions to Mars and beyond has been awarded by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center to Reisz Engineers of Huntsville, Ala.

The $600,000, two-year award follows up on earlier work, which included developing an experimental throttleable in-space thruster (rocket) design.

Al Reisz, who heads the company, is an ASME Fellow and is a frequent contributor to Mechanical Engineering magazine. He is a member of ASME's North Alabama Section.

The contract will develop an experimental magnetically confined plasma thruster and conduct certain propulsion parameter performance experiments. The thruster features variable specific impulses and has no electrodes. The propellant gas will be transformed to a highly energized plasma state by an electron cyclotron resonance heater. The experimental model will be able to generate thrust in more than one propulsion configuration.

By shaping the magnetic field, the plasma will be accelerated to form a high-speed jet, producing thrust as the jet exhausts into a vacuum tank, simulating space propulsion. The propellants will be argon in the experimental model with water-cooled magnetics. Hydrogen will propel the flight model, which will be cryogenically cooled.

Reisz and Jerry Brainerd will lead the contract work efforts. Terry Kammash of the University of Michigan is the lead for the University of Michigan effort. He is the author of many publications on gas dynamic mirror propulsion and editor of Fusion Energy for Space Propulsion. They will be working with Bill Emrich of Marshall Space Flight Center.

The development of a flight model of this type of in-space thruster is expected to make interplanetary space travel a reality.

It will help to fulfill NASA's current planning for Mars missions and long-range vision of exploring the outer reaches of the solar system.

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