Ion plasma engine. Russia has begun manufacturing a plasma rocket engine. Spd on earth and in space

1) an electric rocket engine in which the working fluid is plasma; 2) the same as an electromagnetic rocket engine...

1) an electric rocket engine in which the working fluid is plasma; 2) the same as an electromagnetic rocket engine. * * * PLASMA ROCKET MOTOR PLASMA ROCKET MOTOR, 1) electric rocket motor (see ELECTRIC... ... encyclopedic Dictionary

A jet engine, the energy source and working fluid of which is located in the vehicle itself. The rocket engine is the only one practically mastered for launching a payload into orbit of an artificial Earth satellite and for use in ... ... Wikipedia

TNRE design options Thermonuclear rocket engine (TNRE) is a promising rocket engine for space flights, in which it is supposed to generate thrust ... Wikipedia

A plasma engine, an electric rocket engine, in which the working fluid converted into plasma is accelerated using an electromagnet. fields. Ud. impulse E. r. d. can reach several. hundreds of km/s. First tested in flight on an owl. KA Probe 2. Cm.… … Big Encyclopedic Polytechnic Dictionary

- (plasma, magnetohydrodynamic), an electric rocket engine in which the working fluid is in a plasma state and accelerates using the electromagnetic field acting on it. Specific impulse 15,100 km/s. * * *… … encyclopedic Dictionary

- (plasma magnetohydrodynamic), an electric rocket engine in which the working fluid is in a plasma state and accelerates using the electromagnetic field acting on it. Specific impulse 15,100 km/s... Big Encyclopedic Dictionary

Electromagnetic rocket engine, plasma rocket engine, electric propulsion propulsion electric rocket engine that creates thrust due to acceleration in the electromagnetic field of the working fluid, converted into plasma. Operating principles of electric propulsion consists of two main... ... Wikipedia

The problem of moving in space has been facing humanity since the beginning of orbital flights. A rocket taking off from the ground consumes almost all its fuel, plus the charges of accelerators and stages. And if a rocket can still be lifted off the ground, having refueled it with a huge amount of fuel, at the cosmodrome, then in outer space there is simply nowhere and nothing to refuel with. But after entering orbit, you need to move on. But there is no fuel.

And this is the main problem of modern astronautics. It is still possible to throw a ship into orbit with enough fuel to reach the moon; under this theory, plans are being made to create a refueling base on the moon for “long-range” spacecraft flying, for example, to Mars. But it's all too complicated.

And the solution to the problem was created a long time ago, back in 1955, when Alexey Ivanovich Morozov published the article “On the acceleration of plasma by a magnetic field.” In it, he described the concept of a fundamentally new space engine.

Ion plasma engine design

Operating principle plasma engine is that the working fluid is not burning fuel, as in jet engines, but a flow of ions accelerated by a magnetic field to insane speeds.

The source of ions is gas, usually argon or hydrogen, a gas tank is located at the very beginning of the engine, from there the gas is supplied to the ionization compartment, cold plasma is obtained, which is heated in the next compartment by means of ion cyclotron resonance heating. After heating, high-energy plasma is fed into a magnetic nozzle, where it is formed into a flow through a magnetic field, accelerated and released into the environment. This is how traction is achieved.

Since then, plasma engines have come a long way and are divided into several main types, these are electrothermal engines, electrostatic engines, high-current or magnetodynamic engines and pulse engines.

In turn, electrostatic engines are divided into ion and plasma (particle accelerators using quasi-neutral plasma).

In this article we will write about modern ion engines and their promising developments, since in our opinion the future of the space fleet lies with them.

An ion engine uses xenon or mercury as fuel. The first ion engine was called a reticulated electrostatic ion engine.

The principle of its operation is as follows:

The ionizer is supplied xenon, which is neutral in itself, but becomes ionized when bombarded with high-energy electrons. Thus, a mixture of positive ions and negative electrons is formed in the chamber. To “filter” electrons, a tube with cathode grids is brought into the chamber, which attracts electrons.

Positive ions are attracted to the extraction system, consisting of 2 or 3 grids. A large difference in electrostatic potentials is maintained between the grids (+1090 volts on the internal one versus -225 on the external one). As a result of ions getting between the grids, they are accelerated and thrown into space, accelerating the ship, according to Newton's third law.

Russian ion engines. On all of them, the cathode tubes are clearly visible, directed towards the nozzle

Electrons trapped in the cathode tube are ejected from the engine at a slight angle to the nozzle and ion flow. This is done for two reasons:

Firstly, so that the ship’s hull remains neutrally charged, and secondly, so that the “neutralized” ions are not attracted back to the ship in this way.

For an ion engine to work, you need only two things - gas and electricity. With the first, everything is just fine; the engine of the American interplanetary spacecraft Dawn, which launched in the fall of 2007, will require only 425 kilograms of xenon to fly for almost 6 years. For comparison, adjusting the ISS orbit using conventional rocket engines requires 7.5 tons of fuel every year.

One bad thing is that ion engines have very little thrust, on the order of 50–100 millinewtons, which is absolutely insufficient when moving in the Earth’s atmosphere. But in space, where there is practically no resistance, an ion engine can reach significant speeds during prolonged acceleration. The total speed increase over the entire duration of the Dawn mission will be about 10 kilometers per second.

Ion engine test for Deep Space ship

Recent tests conducted by the American company Ad Astra Rocket, carried out in a vacuum chamber, showed that their new Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket VASIMR VX-200 can produce thrust as low as 5 Newtons.

The second issue is electricity. The same VX-200 consumes 201 kW of energy. Solar batteries are simply not enough for such an engine. Therefore, it is necessary to invent new ways to obtain energy in space. There are two ways here - refillable batteries, such as tritium ones, launched into orbit along with the ship, or an autonomous nuclear reactor, which will power the ship throughout the flight.

Back in 2006, the European Space Agency and the Australian National University successfully tested a new generation of space ion engines, achieving record performance.

Engines in which charged particles are accelerated in an electric field have long been known. They are used for orientation, orbit correction on some satellites and interplanetary vehicles, and in a number of space projects (both already implemented and just planned - read, and) - even as marching ones.

Experts associate the further exploration of the solar system with them. And although all varieties of so-called electric rocket engines are much inferior to chemical ones in maximum thrust (grams versus kilograms and tons), they are radically superior to them in efficiency (fuel consumption per gram of thrust per second). And this efficiency (specific impulse) is directly proportional to the speed of the ejected jet stream.

So, in an experimental engine called “Dual-Stage 4-Grid” (DS4G), built under an ESA contract in Australia, this speed reached a record 210 kilometers per second.

This, for example, is 60 times higher than the exhaust speed of good chemical engines, and 4-10 times higher than that of previous ion engines.

As is clear from the name of the development, this speed is achieved by a two-stage process of ion acceleration using four successive gratings (instead of the traditional one stage and three gratings), as well as high voltage - 30 kilovolts. In addition, the divergence of the output reactive beam was only 3 degrees, versus about 15 degrees for previous systems.

Here is the information from the last few days.

An ion engine (ID) works simply: gas from a tank (xenon, argon, etc.) is ionized and accelerated by an electrostatic field. Since the mass of the ion is small, and it can receive a significant charge, the ions fly out of the engine at speeds of up to 210 km/s. Chemical engines can achieve... no, nothing like that, but only twenty times lower speed of combustion products only in exceptional cases. Accordingly, gas consumption in comparison with the consumption of chemical fuel is extremely small.

That is why such “long-range” probes as Hayabusa, Deep Space One and Dawn have worked and are working entirely or partially on ID. And if you are going to not only fly by inertia to distant celestial bodies, but also actively maneuver near them, then you cannot do without such engines.

In 2014, ion engines celebrate their half-century anniversary in space. All this time, the problem of erosion could not be solved even to a first approximation. (Here and below illustration. NASA, Wikimedia Commons.)

Like all good things, ID loves to be powered: one newton of thrust requires up to 25 kW of energy. Let's imagine that we were tasked with launching a 100-ton spacecraft to Pluto (you'll forgive us for being daydreaming!). Ideally, even for Jupiter we will need 1,000 newtons of thrust and 10 months, and to Neptune with the same thrust - a year and a half. In general, let’s not talk about Pluto, otherwise it’s kind of sad...

Well, to get these still speculative 1,000 newtons, we need 25 megawatts. In principle, nothing technically impossible - a 100-ton ship could accommodate a nuclear reactor. By the way, NASA and the US Department of Energy are currently working on the Fission Surface Power project. True, we are talking about bases on the Moon and Mars, and not about ships. But the mass of the reactor is not so high - only five tons, with dimensions of 3x3x7 m...

Well, okay, let’s dream and that’s enough, you say, and immediately remember the ditty allegedly invented by Leo Tolstoy during the Crimean War. Ultimately, such a large flow of ions passing through the engine (and this is a key obstacle) will cause it to erode, and much faster than in ten months or a year and a half. Moreover, this is not a problem of choosing a structural material - fortunately, both titanium and diamond will be destroyed under such conditions - but an integral part of the design of the ion engine per se.

The portal militaryarms.ru reports that back in 2016, an application was submitted to the Foundation for Advanced Research, drawn up by the scientific and technical council of NPO Energomash and the National Research Center Kurchatov Institute. The application is dedicated to the implementation of a rather ambitious project that will allow the creation of an electrodeless plasma rocket engine. Abbreviated as BPRD. A clear scope of work has been determined to allow the production of a laboratory sample of the engine.

At its core, an electric propulsion engine (electric rocket engine) is an electric motor in which the working fluid is capable of acquiring acceleration in a special state of plasma. The original idea of ​​plasma engines belongs to the Soviet physicist A. I. Morozov. He put forward it back in the 60s. Today's application of such engines is to support positioning points for communication satellites.

The new generation of plasma engines, which are going to be manufactured at Energomash, have a power of over 100 kW. They can be used not only for geostationary satellites. Such engines are suitable for flights that are characterized as interstellar.

Recent years in the world have been marked by several developments of plasma engines. They can be classified as a new generation. This is a helicon plasma engine from the European Space Agency, collaborating with the Iranian Space Agency and the Australian National University. This is also the development of Canadian engineers and Americans from the Ad Astra Rocket Company. The American-Canadian engine has a power of 200 kW.

Popular mechanics

The portal topwar.ru clarified that, according to the press service of Roscosmos. The Chemical Automatics Design Bureau will take part in the development of the engine. The site quotes a press communiqué from Roscosmos: “The version of the electrodeless plasma rocket engine currently being considered is a new generation of electric propulsion. This is a high-power engine, the working substance in which is in a plasma state. It has high energy efficiency, the ability to use almost any substance as a working fluid, is capable of changing the specific impulse value, and the maximum engine power is limited almost exclusively by the power supply of the high-frequency generator. Also, an engine of this type can potentially have a long service life, since all restrictions associated with the influence of an energy-saturated working substance with structural elements are removed,” the press service said.

In conclusion, I would like to say that not a single plasma engine for spacecraft existing in our time is capable of delivering a rocket even to the nearest stars. This applies to both experimentally tested devices and theoretically calculated ones.

Many scientists come to a pessimistic conclusion - the gap between our planet and the stars is fatally insurmountable. Even to the Alpha Centauri system, some components of which are visible to the naked eye from Earth, but the distance is 39.9 trillion kilometers. Even on a spacecraft capable of traveling at the speed of light, covering this distance would take about 4.2-4.3 years.

So the plasma units of starships are, rather, from the realm of science fiction. But this does not at all diminish their importance! They are used as maneuvering, auxiliary and orbit-correcting engines. Therefore, the invention is completely justified.

But a nuclear pulse unit, which utilizes the energy of explosions, has probable development potential. In any case, at least in theory, sending an automatic probe to the nearest star system is possible.

Meteor-10, launched on December 29, 1971 into a conditionally synchronous orbit (which made it possible to pass over the same points on the earth's surface at certain intervals) was the most common weather satellite. But only at first glance: on board, in addition to the usual orientation system, there were two more experimental engines.

One of them, named after the Greek god of the west wind - “Zephyr”, worked for only about an hour and did not receive further development. But the second, named after the lord of the winds - “Eol-1”, developed by a group of employees of the IAE (Institute of Atomic Energy) under the leadership of Alexey Ivanovich Morozov and manufactured by the Kaliningrad Design Bureau “Fakel”, marked the beginning of a whole space direction - plasma engines.

The history of plasma engines began in 1950, when a graduate of the Moscow State University physics department, Alexei Morozov, was assigned by the party committee to teach mechanics and electrical engineering at the technical school of the factory village of Lyudinovo in the southeast of the Kaluga region. The reason is simple: Morozov’s father was repressed and no one took into account either his specialization (quantum field theory) or the repeated requests of his scientific supervisor, the dean of the physics department Arseniy Aleksandrovich Sokolov, to leave him at the department.

Physics teachers in those years were quite often asked to give lectures on atomic energy, and Morozov was no exception. One day in 1953, he was returning to Lyudinovo from a similar lecture in the village of Black Stream. “Not long before, I read Goodman’s book about the basics of nuclear energy. There was a diagram of a nuclear missile - the gas passed through the active zone and heated up. I was struck by how inefficient this design is - on the one hand, nuclear energy, and on the other, it’s just a heat engine! - recalls Alexey Ivanovich. “And while I was walking 12 km along the sleepers to Lyudinovo, I remembered the experiments with the Ampere force and the Thomson coil, which I showed to students at the school, and the idea came to me - why not accelerate the working fluid with a magnetic field?”

Theoretical calculations showed that this was quite possible, and Morozov decided to conduct an experiment. Having made a “brick” from asbestos cement, he drilled two holes in it crosswise. He inserted two carbon rods from batteries into one from different sides, and placed two poles of a powerful electromagnet on top and bottom of the bar. In the normal state, the plasma formed during the burning of the arc flew out with a slight hiss from both sides of the second hole, but as soon as the electromagnet was turned on, the flow began to beat in one direction with a terrible roar.

An SPD is a ring electromagnet, in the gap of which a ceramic chamber is placed. The anode is located at the end of the chamber. Outside, near the cut of the engine channel, there are two cathodes-neutralizers. Working xenon is fed into the chamber and ionized near the anode. Ions are accelerated into electricity. field and fly out of the engine, creating jet thrust. Their space charge is neutralized by electrons supplied from the cathode-neutralizer.

In 1955, Morozov wrote an article “On the possibility of creating plasma electric propulsion engines,” but his scientific supervisor, after reading it, gave good advice: “Such an article will be classified immediately. It's better to change the name to something more neutral." As a result, an article was published in JETP (Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics) entitled “On the acceleration of plasma by a magnetic field.” It was reviewed by the head of the plasma research department at the Institute of Atomic Energy, Lev Artsimovich. The theory outlined in Morozov's article was later reflected in Artsimovich's own article on the railgun (only Morozov had a constant magnetic field, while Artsimovich had an electrodynamic field).

The publication caused a great resonance among specialists; it was even discussed twice at a meeting of the American Physical Society.

In 1955, Morozov defended his dissertation, and in 1957 he was invited to work at the Institute of Atomic Energy. By the end of the 1950s, the USSR's successes in space inspired designers to take on several large-scale space projects. It was even planned to fly to Mars, and therefore on July 2, 1959, Lev Artsimovich called his employees for a meeting. The topic of discussion was the possibility of building engines for a Martian ship. Artsimovich proposed the following characteristics for such a system: thrust of about 10 kgf, exhaust speed of 100 km/s with an engine power of 10 MW.

IAE employees proposed several projects: a plasma pulse engine (A.M. Andrianov), a magnetic-plasma analogue of the Laval nozzle (A.I. Morozov) and an engine based on a single-slit ion source, almost the same as that used for electromagnetic separation of isotopes (Pavel Matveevich Morozov, namesake of Alexei Ivanovich).

By the way, all these projects were later implemented in one form or another. The plasma-erosion (pulse version) Andrianov engine of significantly lower power was installed on one of the satellites and launched into space in 1964, and the ion engine P.M. Morozov, under the name “Zefir” (also low-power), stood on the same “Meteor-10” satellite. Experiments with a magnetic analogue of a Laval nozzle with a central body (the developers themselves called it “coaxial”) have been conducted since 1960, but the design turned out to be complex, and it was built only in 1980 by the joint efforts of the IAE, the Kharkov Institute of Physics and Technology, TRINITI and the Institute of Physics Belarus. The power of this monster was 10 GW!

However, these projects were not suitable for the Mars program for one simple reason: the designers then did not have power sources of suitable power. This problem is still relevant today: the maximum you can count on is tens of kilowatts. It was necessary to move to a small scale.

Georgy Grodzovsky (TsAGI) was one of the first to design low-power electric rocket engines in our country. Since 1959, its ion engines have been tested in space (though not on satellites, but on ballistic missiles). In 1957 M.S. Ioffe and E.E. Yushmanov began researching a magnetic (so-called mirror) plasma trap. To fill it with hot plasma (10 million degrees), they used the acceleration of ions in crossed electric and magnetic fields. This work served as the foundation for the creation of a number of plasma engines.

In 1962, Alexey Morozov proposed his design of a low-power plasma engine, called SPD (stationary plasma engine). A fundamentally important feature of the SPT was that the magnitude of the magnetic field increased towards the end of the engine channel - this ensured the creation of a volumetric electric field in the plasma. The whole idea of ​​the engine was built precisely on the existence of such a field.

The simplest electric rocket engines heat up the gas before emitting an electric arc (arcjets) or a hot wire - resistojets. They are also found in our time - their design is simple, cheap and reliable. True, the efficiency, exhaust velocity and thrust are low. The American G. Kaufman is considered the pioneer of ion engines. His design uses arc discharge ionization, and the ions are then accelerated by an electrostatic field in an ion-optical system.

“Townsend first pointed out the possibility of the existence of volumetric electric fields in plasma in 1910, but for 50 years attempts to create such a field were unsuccessful. At that time, it was believed that since plasma is a conductor, a field cannot be created in it. In fact, it is really impossible to create a volumetric electric field in a plasma without a magnetic field - it is shielded due to free electrons. But in the presence of a magnetic field, which affects the movement of electrons, volumetric electric fields in the plasma can exist.

Group A.I. Morozova began studying SPD in 1962. For almost five years the engine existed in a laboratory version - in 1967 the model was still equipped with water cooling. It was time to begin flight and space tests, but at this stage the developers encountered an unexpected problem. Spacecraft designers categorically refused to put anything electrical on board! The director of the IAE, Academician Alexandrov, met several times with the designers of various spacecraft, and he finally managed to come to an agreement with Iosifyan, the chief designer of the Meteor series satellites.

However, the problems did not end there. In 1969, Iosifyan issued a technical assignment to the development group, according to which they had to make not the engine itself, but the entire installation, including the power supply system, xenon supply, etc. At the same time, it was necessary to keep within very strict limits: thrust 2 gf, efficiency 30-40%, power consumption 400 W, weight 15 kg, service life 100 hours. And all this had to be done in 5 months! Morozov's group worked literally day and night, but they managed to do it. The production of the propulsion system was entrusted to the Kaliningrad Design Bureau "Fakel", whose director at that time was the talented designer Roald Snarsky. A few days after the launch of Meteor, experiments with engines began. "Eol-1" was installed on the satellite in such a way that the axis of its thrust did not pass through the center of mass of the device. When the engine was turned on, a certain torque arose, which could be compensated by the orientation system, while it also served as a thrust meter for the Aeolus.

The experiment was closely followed not only by the creators of the engine, but also by skeptics, of whom there were plenty. “Eol-1” was supposed to work for only a few minutes, then automatically turn off (the designers were afraid that the plasma jet would block the radio signal). The engine did its job and turned off. After radio monitoring of the orbit, it turned out that the results exactly corresponded to laboratory data. True, skeptics did not calm down and put forward the hypothesis that the change in orbit was caused by the usual outflow of gas through an open valve. But this assumption was not confirmed: after the second activation on command from the Earth, the engine worked for another 170 hours, raising the Meteor-10 orbit by 15 km. OKB Fakel coped with its task perfectly: the service life was almost doubled.

This year, the Electric Rocket Propulsion Society (ERPS) decided to celebrate a century of research in this field (1906-2006) and established a special award - the Medal for Excellence in the Field of Electric Propulsion. Alexey Ivanovich Morozov was among the first six awarded. The other five are E. Stuhlinger, G. Kaufman and R. Yang (USA), G. Loeb (Germany) and K. Kuriki (Japan).

In the early 1980s, Fakel began mass production of SPD-70 engines - the descendants of the Eols. The first satellite with this engine, Geyser No. 1, was launched in 1982, and in 1994, the new SPD-100 model was equipped with the Hals-1 communications satellite. However, although the report on the successful testing of the Aeolus plasma engine in 1974 was completely openly published in the journal Space Research, foreign designers considered the SPD only an interesting theoretical development. Therefore, the demonstration to representatives of NASA and JPL in 1991 of working Fakel engines and the message that production satellites were equipped with similar ones caused them a real shock (the Americans mainly followed the path of developing ion engines).

It is not surprising that Fakel is now considered the world's leading manufacturer of electric rocket plasma engines. “Every third Russian satellite has our engine, and three of the five largest Western spacecraft manufacturers buy SPD from us,” said Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Murashko, director and general designer of the Fakel Design Bureau. “For example, the MBSat-1, Intelsat-X-02, Inmarsat-4F1 satellites are equipped with them.” When sending its SMART-1 satellite to the Moon, the European Space Agency chose PPS-1350 plasma engines for it, a joint development of the French company Snecma Moteurs, Fakel Design Bureau and MIREA.

What awaits us in the near future? In the 1980s, a group at MIREA developed the next generation engine, the SPD Aten. The divergence of the plasma beam in the SPD-100 is +/- 45 degrees, the efficiency is 50%, and the corresponding characteristics of the SPD Aton are +/- 15 degrees and 65%! It is not yet in demand, like our other engine, the two-stage SPD Max with a modified field geometry - designers are currently making do with the simpler SPD-100. Deep space requires engines on the scale of 10-100 kW or even MW. Similar developments already exist - in 1976, the IAE made an engine with a power of 30 kW, and Fakel in the late 1980s developed the SPD-290 with a power of 25 kW for the Hercules space tug. In any case, the theory of such engines has been built, so within the framework of the classical SPD scheme it is quite possible to increase the power to 300 kW. But then you may have to move on to other designs. For example, to a two-lens hydrogen accelerator developed at the Institute of Atomic Energy in the late 1970s. This machine had a power of 5 MW and an exhaust speed of 1000 km/s. In any case, interplanetary ships will have plasma engines.

Review prepared based on materials: Popular Mechanics

Original taken from

Alexander Losev

The rapid development of rocket and space technology in the 20th century was determined by the military-strategic, political and, to a certain extent, ideological goals and interests of the two superpowers - the USSR and the USA, and all state space programs were a continuation of their military projects, where the main task was the need to ensure defense capability and strategic parity with a potential enemy. The cost of creating equipment and operating costs were not of fundamental importance then. Enormous resources were allocated to the creation of launch vehicles and spacecraft, and the 108-minute flight of Yuri Gagarin in 1961 and the television broadcast of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin from the surface of the Moon in 1969 were not just triumphs of scientific and technical thought, they were also considered as strategic victories in battles of the Cold War.

But after the Soviet Union collapsed and dropped out of the race for world leadership, its geopolitical opponents, primarily the United States, no longer needed to implement prestigious but extremely costly space projects in order to prove to the whole world the superiority of the Western economic system and ideological concepts.
In the 90s, the main political tasks of previous years lost relevance, bloc confrontation was replaced by globalization, pragmatism prevailed in the world, so most space programs were curtailed or postponed; only the ISS remained as a legacy from the large-scale projects of the past. In addition, Western democracy has made all expensive government programs dependent on electoral cycles.
Voter support, necessary to gain or maintain power, forces politicians, parliaments and governments to lean toward populism and solve short-term problems, so spending on space exploration is reduced year after year.
Most of the fundamental discoveries were made in the first half of the twentieth century, and today science and technology have reached certain limits, moreover, the popularity of scientific knowledge has decreased throughout the world, and the quality of teaching mathematics, physics and other natural sciences has deteriorated. This has become the reason for the stagnation, including in the space sector, of the last two decades.
But now it becomes obvious that the world is approaching the end of another technological cycle based on the discoveries of the last century. Therefore, any power that will possess fundamentally new promising technologies at the time of change in the global technological structure will automatically ensure global leadership for at least the next fifty years.

Fundamental design of a nuclear propulsion engine with hydrogen as a working fluid

This is realized both in the United States, which has set a course for the revival of American greatness in all spheres of activity, and in China, which is challenging American hegemony, and in the European Union, which is trying with all its might to maintain its weight in the global economy.
There is an industrial policy there and they are seriously engaged in the development of their own scientific, technical and production potential, and the space sphere can become the best testing ground for testing new technologies and for proving or refuting scientific hypotheses that can lay the foundation for the creation of a fundamentally different, more advanced technology of the future.
And it is quite natural to expect that the United States will be the first country where deep space exploration projects will be resumed in order to create unique innovative technologies in the field of weapons, transport and structural materials, as well as in biomedicine and telecommunications
True, not even the United States is guaranteed success in creating revolutionary technologies. There is a high risk of ending up in a dead end when improving half-a-century old rocket engines based on chemical fuel, as Elon Musk’s SpaceX is doing, or when creating life support systems for long flights similar to those already implemented on the ISS.
Can Russia, whose stagnation in the space sector is becoming more noticeable every year, make a leap in the race for future technological leadership to remain in the club of superpowers, and not in the list of developing countries?
Yes, of course, Russia can, and moreover, a noticeable step forward has already been made in nuclear energy and in nuclear rocket engine technologies, despite the chronic underfunding of the space industry.
The future of astronautics is the use of nuclear energy. To understand how nuclear technology and space are connected, it is necessary to consider the basic principles of jet propulsion.
So, the main types of modern space engines are created on the principles of chemical energy. These are solid fuel accelerators and liquid rocket engines, in their combustion chambers the fuel components (fuel and oxidizer) enter into an exothermic physical and chemical combustion reaction, forming a jet stream that ejects tons of substance from the engine nozzle every second. The kinetic energy of the jet's working fluid is converted into a reactive force sufficient to propel the rocket. The specific impulse (the ratio of the thrust generated to the mass of the fuel used) of such chemical engines depends on the fuel components, the pressure and temperature in the combustion chamber, as well as the molecular weight of the gaseous mixture ejected through the engine nozzle.
And the higher the temperature of the substance and the pressure inside the combustion chamber, and the lower the molecular mass of the gas, the higher the specific impulse, and therefore the efficiency of the engine. Specific impulse is a quantity of motion and is usually measured in meters per second, just like speed.
In chemical engines, the highest specific impulse is provided by oxygen-hydrogen and fluorine-hydrogen fuel mixtures (4500–4700 m/s), but the most popular (and convenient to operate) have become rocket engines running on kerosene and oxygen, for example the Soyuz and Musk's Falcon rockets, as well as engines using unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine (UDMH) with an oxidizer in the form of a mixture of nitrogen tetroxide and nitric acid (Soviet and Russian Proton, French Ariane, American Titan). Their efficiency is 1.5 times lower than that of hydrogen fuel engines, but an impulse of 3000 m/s and power are quite enough to make it economically profitable to launch tons of payload into near-Earth orbits.
But flights to other planets require much larger spacecraft than anything mankind has previously created, including the modular ISS. In these ships it is necessary to ensure long-term autonomous existence of the crews, and a certain supply of fuel and service life of the main engines and engines for maneuvers and orbit correction, to provide for the delivery of astronauts in a special landing module to the surface of another planet, and their return to the main transport ship, and then and the return of the expedition to Earth.
The accumulated engineering knowledge and chemical energy of engines make it possible to return to the Moon and reach Mars, so there is a high probability that humanity will visit the Red Planet in the next decade.
If we rely only on existing space technologies, then the minimum mass of the habitable module for a manned flight to Mars or to the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn will be approximately 90 tons, which is 3 times more than the lunar ships of the early 1970s, which means launch vehicles for their launch into reference orbits for further flight to Mars will be much superior to the Saturn 5 (launch weight 2965 tons) of the Apollo lunar project or the Soviet carrier Energia (launch weight 2400 tons). It will be necessary to create an interplanetary complex in orbit weighing up to 500 tons. A flight on an interplanetary ship with chemical rocket engines will require from 8 months to 1 year in one direction only, because you will have to do gravity maneuvers, using the gravitational force of the planets and a colossal supply of fuel to additionally accelerate the ship.
But using the chemical energy of rocket engines, humanity will not fly further than the orbit of Mars or Venus. We need different flight speeds of spacecraft and other more powerful energy of movement.

Modern design of a nuclear rocket engine Princeton Satellite Systems

To explore deep space, it is necessary to significantly increase the thrust-to-weight ratio and efficiency of the rocket engine, and therefore increase its specific impulse and service life. And to do this, it is necessary to heat a gas or working fluid substance with low atomic mass inside the engine chamber to temperatures several times higher than the chemical combustion temperature of traditional fuel mixtures, and this can be done using a nuclear reaction.
If, instead of a conventional combustion chamber, a nuclear reactor is placed inside a rocket engine, into the active zone of which a substance in liquid or gaseous form is supplied, then it, heated under high pressure up to several thousand degrees, will begin to be ejected through the nozzle channel, creating jet thrust. The specific impulse of such a nuclear jet engine will be several times greater than that of a conventional one with chemical components, which means that the efficiency of both the engine itself and the launch vehicle as a whole will increase many times over. In this case, an oxidizer for fuel combustion will not be required, and light hydrogen gas can be used as a substance that creates jet thrust; we know that the lower the molecular mass of the gas, the higher the impulse, and this will greatly reduce the mass of the rocket with better performance engine power.
A nuclear engine will be better than a conventional one, since in the reactor zone the light gas can be heated to temperatures exceeding 9 thousand degrees Kelvin, and a jet of such superheated gas will provide a much higher specific impulse than conventional chemical engines can provide. But this is in theory.
The danger is not even that when a launch vehicle with such a nuclear installation is launched, radioactive contamination of the atmosphere and space around the launch pad may occur; the main problem is that at high temperatures the engine itself, along with the spacecraft, may melt. Designers and engineers understand this and have been trying to find suitable solutions for several decades.
Nuclear rocket engines (NRE) already have their own history of creation and operation in space. The first development of nuclear engines began in the mid-1950s, that is, even before human flight into space, and almost simultaneously in both the USSR and the USA, and the very idea of ​​​​using nuclear reactors to heat the working substance in a rocket engine was born along with the first rectors in mid-40s, that is, more than 70 years ago.
In our country, the initiator of the creation of nuclear propulsion was the thermal physicist Vitaly Mikhailovich Ievlev. In 1947, he presented a project that was supported by S. P. Korolev, I. V. Kurchatov and M. V. Keldysh. Initially, it was planned to use such engines for cruise missiles, and then install them on ballistic missiles. The development was undertaken by the leading defense design bureaus of the Soviet Union, as well as research institutes NIITP, CIAM, IAE, VNIINM.
The Soviet nuclear engine RD-0410 was assembled in the mid-60s at the Voronezh Chemical Automatics Design Bureau, where most liquid rocket engines for space technology were created.
The RD-0410 used hydrogen as a working fluid, which in liquid form passed through a “cooling jacket”, removing excess heat from the walls of the nozzle and preventing it from melting, and then entered the reactor core, where it was heated to 3000K and released through the channel nozzles, thus converting thermal energy into kinetic energy and creating a specific impulse of 9100 m/s.
In the USA, the nuclear propulsion project was launched in 1952, and the first operating engine was created in 1966 and was named NERVA (Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application). In the 60s and 70s, the Soviet Union and the United States tried not to yield to each other.
True, both our RD-0410 and the American NERVA were solid-phase nuclear propellant engines (nuclear fuel based on uranium carbides was in the solid state in the reactor), and their operating temperature was in the range of 2300–3100K.
To increase the temperature of the core without the risk of explosion or melting of the reactor walls, it is necessary to create such nuclear reaction conditions under which the fuel (uranium) turns into a gaseous state or turns into plasma and is held inside the reactor by a strong magnetic field, without touching the walls. And then the hydrogen entering the reactor core “flows around” the uranium in the gas phase, and turning into plasma, is ejected at a very high speed through the nozzle channel.
This type of engine is called a gas-phase nuclear propulsion engine. The temperatures of the gaseous uranium fuel in such nuclear engines can range from 10 thousand to 20 thousand degrees Kelvin, and the specific impulse can reach 50,000 m/s, which is 11 times higher than that of the most efficient chemical rocket engines.
The creation and use of gas-phase nuclear propulsion engines of open and closed types in space technology is the most promising direction in the development of space rocket engines and exactly what humanity needs to explore the planets of the Solar System and their satellites.
The first research on the gas-phase nuclear propulsion project began in the USSR in 1957 at the Research Institute of Thermal Processes (National Research Center named after M. V. Keldysh), and the decision to develop nuclear space power plants based on gas-phase nuclear reactors was made in 1963 by Academician V. P. Glushko (NPO Energomash), and then approved by a resolution of the CPSU Central Committee and the Council of Ministers of the USSR.
The development of gas-phase nuclear propulsion engines was carried out in the Soviet Union for two decades, but, unfortunately, was never completed due to insufficient funding and the need for additional fundamental research in the field of thermodynamics of nuclear fuel and hydrogen plasma, neutron physics and magnetohydrodynamics.
Soviet nuclear scientists and design engineers faced a number of problems, such as achieving criticality and ensuring the stability of the operation of a gas-phase nuclear reactor, reducing the loss of molten uranium during the release of hydrogen heated to several thousand degrees, thermal protection of the nozzle and magnetic field generator, and the accumulation of uranium fission products , selection of chemically resistant construction materials, etc.
And when the Energia launch vehicle began to be created for the Soviet Mars-94 program for the first manned flight to Mars, the nuclear engine project was postponed indefinitely. The Soviet Union did not have enough time, and most importantly, political will and economic efficiency, to land our cosmonauts on the planet Mars in 1994. This would be an undeniable achievement and proof of our leadership in high technology over the next few decades. But space, like many other things, was betrayed by the last leadership of the USSR. History cannot be changed, departed scientists and engineers cannot be brought back, and lost knowledge cannot be restored. A lot will have to be created anew.
But space nuclear power is not limited only to the sphere of solid- and gas-phase nuclear propulsion engines. Electrical energy can be used to create a heated flow of matter in a jet engine. This idea was first expressed by Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky back in 1903 in his work “Exploration of world spaces using jet instruments.”
And the first electrothermal rocket engine in the USSR was created in the 1930s by Valentin Petrovich Glushko, a future academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences and the head of NPO Energia.
The operating principles of electric rocket engines can be different. They are usually divided into four types:

• electrothermal (heating or electric arc). In them, the gas is heated to temperatures of 1000–5000K and ejected from the nozzle in the same way as in a nuclear rocket engine.
• electrostatic engines (colloidal and ionic), in which the working substance is first ionized, and then positive ions (atoms devoid of electrons) are accelerated in an electrostatic field and are also ejected through the nozzle channel, creating jet thrust. Electrostatic engines also include stationary plasma engines.
• magnetoplasma and magnetodynamic rocket engines. There, the gas plasma is accelerated due to the Ampere force in the magnetic and electric fields intersecting perpendicularly.
• pulse rocket engines, which use the energy of gases resulting from the evaporation of a working fluid in an electric discharge.

The advantage of these electric rocket engines is the low consumption of the working fluid, efficiency up to 60% and high particle flow speed, which can significantly reduce the mass of the spacecraft, but there is also a disadvantage - low thrust density, and therefore low power, as well as the high cost of the working fluid (inert gases or vapors of alkali metals) to create plasma.
All of the listed types of electric motors have been implemented in practice and have been repeatedly used in space on both Soviet and American spacecraft since the mid-60s, but due to their low power they were used mainly as orbit correction engines.
From 1968 to 1988, the USSR launched a whole series of Cosmos satellites with nuclear installations on board. The types of reactors were named: “Buk”, “Topaz” and “Yenisei”.
The Yenisei project reactor had a thermal power of up to 135 kW and an electrical power of about 5 kW. The coolant was a sodium-potassium melt. This project was closed in 1996.
A real propulsion rocket motor requires a very powerful source of energy. And the best source of energy for such space engines is a nuclear reactor.
Nuclear energy is one of the high-tech industries where our country maintains a leading position. And a fundamentally new rocket engine is already being created in Russia and this project is close to successful completion in 2018. Flight tests are scheduled for 2020.
And if gas-phase nuclear propulsion is a topic for future decades that will have to be returned to after fundamental research, then its today’s alternative is a megawatt-class nuclear power propulsion system (NPPU), and it has already been created by Rosatom and Roscosmos enterprises since 2009.
NPO Krasnaya Zvezda, which is currently the world's only developer and manufacturer of space nuclear power plants, as well as the Research Center named after A. M. V. Keldysh, NIKIET im. N.A. Dollezhala, Research Institute NPO “Luch”, “Kurchatov Institute”, IRM, IPPE, RIAR and NPO Mashinostroeniya.
The nuclear power propulsion system includes a high-temperature gas-cooled fast neutron nuclear reactor with a turbomachine system for converting thermal energy into electrical energy, a system of refrigerator-emitters for removing excess heat into space, an instrumentation compartment, a block of sustainer plasma or ion electric motors, and a container for accommodating the payload. .
In a power propulsion system, a nuclear reactor serves as a source of electricity for the operation of electric plasma engines, while the gas coolant of the reactor passing through the core enters the turbine of the electric generator and compressor and returns back to the reactor in a closed loop, and is not thrown into space as in a nuclear propulsion engine, which makes the design more reliable and safe, and therefore suitable for manned space flight.
It is planned that the nuclear power plant will be used for a reusable space tug to ensure the delivery of cargo during the exploration of the Moon or the creation of multi-purpose orbital complexes. The advantage will be not only the reusable use of elements of the transport system (which Elon Musk is trying to achieve in his SpaceX space projects), but also the ability to deliver three times more cargo than on rockets with chemical jet engines of comparable power by reducing the launch mass of the transport system . The special design of the installation makes it safe for people and the environment on Earth.
In 2014, the first standard design fuel element (fuel element) for this nuclear electric propulsion system was assembled at JSC Mashinostroitelny Zavod in Elektrostal, and in 2016 tests of a reactor core basket simulator were carried out.
Now (in 2017) work is underway on the manufacture of structural elements of the installation and testing of components and assemblies on mock-ups, as well as autonomous testing of turbomachine energy conversion systems and prototype power units. Completion of the work is scheduled for the end of next 2018, however, since 2015, the backlog of the schedule began to accumulate.
So, as soon as this installation is created, Russia will become the first country in the world to possess nuclear space technologies, which will form the basis not only for future projects for the exploration of the Solar system, but also for terrestrial and extraterrestrial energy. Space nuclear power plants can be used to create systems for remote transmission of electricity to Earth or to space modules using electromagnetic radiation. And this will also become an advanced technology of the future, where our country will have a leading position.
Based on the plasma electric motors being developed, powerful propulsion systems will be created for long-distance human flights into space and, first of all, for the exploration of Mars, the orbit of which can be reached in just 1.5 months, and not in more than a year, as when using conventional chemical jet engines .
And the future always begins with a revolution in energy. And nothing else. Energy is primary and it is the amount of energy consumption that affects technical progress, defense capability and the quality of life of people.

NASA experimental plasma rocket engine

Soviet astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev proposed a scale of development of civilizations back in 1964. According to this scale, the level of technological development of civilizations depends on the amount of energy that the planet's population uses for its needs. Thus, type I civilization uses all available resources available on the planet; Type II civilization - receives the energy of its star in the system of which it is located; and a type III civilization uses the available energy of its galaxy. Humanity has not yet matured to type I civilization on this scale. We use only 0.16% of the total potential energy reserve of planet Earth. This means that Russia and the whole world have room to grow, and these nuclear technologies will open the way for our country not only to space, but also to future economic prosperity.
And, perhaps, the only option for Russia in the scientific and technical sphere is to now make a revolutionary breakthrough in nuclear space technologies in order to overcome the many-year lag behind the leaders in one “leap” and be right at the origins of a new technological revolution in the next cycle of development of human civilization. Such a unique chance falls to a particular country only once every few centuries.
Unfortunately, Russia, which has not paid enough attention to fundamental sciences and the quality of higher and secondary education over the past 25 years, risks losing this chance forever if the program is curtailed and a new generation of researchers does not replace the current scientists and engineers. The geopolitical and technological challenges that Russia will face in 10–12 years will be very serious, comparable to the threats of the mid-twentieth century. In order to preserve the sovereignty and integrity of Russia in the future, it is now urgently necessary to begin training specialists capable of responding to these challenges and creating something fundamentally new.
There are only about 10 years to transform Russia into a global intellectual and technological center, and this cannot be done without a serious change in the quality of education. For a scientific and technological breakthrough, it is necessary to return to the education system (both school and university) systematic views on the picture of the world, scientific fundamentality and ideological integrity.
As for the current stagnation in the space industry, this is not scary. The physical principles on which modern space technologies are based will be in demand for a long time in the conventional satellite services sector. Let us remember that humanity used sail for 5.5 thousand years, and the era of steam lasted almost 200 years, and only in the twentieth century the world began to change rapidly, because another scientific and technological revolution took place, which launched a wave of innovation and a change in technological structures, which ultimately changed both the world economy and politics. The main thing is to be at the origins of these changes [email protected] ,
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