by San Francisco-Rubicon Space Systems won a NASA contract to develop a prototype of 110-Newton Ascent Thruster.
“It’s bigger than every Ascent Thrust we have sold before,” said Daniel Cavender, director of Rubicon, a division of plasma processes, told Spacenews.
And as far as Cavender can see, it is the most powerful rising bow thruster that is being built for the government. Cavender, who worked on ascent missions in earlier roles at NASA, said that the new contract could pave the way for rising thrusters to serve as the most important propulsion for large satellites, lunar landers and space stations.
First, although climbing screws must free the power nuisance.
Although some developers of the space system would like to abandon many of the safety measures needed to work with Hydrazine, climb notorious is hungry.
“The big question is how far can be climbed, without becoming unreasonable power,” said Cavender. “We have to tackle the differences in power that has delayed this transition from hydrazine to more green fuels.”
To reduce the power demand to the 110-Newton Ascent bow screw, Rubicon engineers concentrated carefully on thermal design.
The simple scaling up of small climbs would have produced a 110-Newton bow screw screw that requires 400 to 500 watts to pre-heat. Instead, for the prototype that is planned to be delivered to the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center later this year, “we push almost 100 watts,” Cavender said.
The 110-Newton Ascent Thrust is “an important part of our route map,” said Brandon Denton, Rubicon Principal Propulsion Engineer, in a statement. “With the nearly 50 percent higher impulse density of Ascent from Hydrazine, our 110-Newton Thrust will match the most bipropellant bow screws.”
Ascent stands for advanced spacecraft energetic non-toxic driving gas. Ascent was developed by the US Air Force Research Laboratory in the nineties.
