Could Experimental Plasma Engines Get Us to Mars in 30 days?

We’ve been talking about going to Mars for decades, but we haven’t yet cracked how to get people there and back safely and in a reasonable amount of time. The problem is one of distance and the limitations of conventional rockets, not to mention that Mars and Earth are in motion.

If we want to go to the Moon, we have the benefit of it always being more or less the same distance from us. Mars, on the other hand, is moving along its own orbit around the Sun. Depending on where the Earth and Mars are, the distances and transit times can vary wildly. We could launch while the planets are close together, shortening the travel time on the way there, but by the time we arrived and did anything interesting, the planets would have moved, and the return trip would be longer. At present, our best plan for a crewed Mars mission would take something like two to three years, round trip.

There’s not a lot we can do about the distances involved, planets are going to do what planets are going to do, but we might be able to build better rockets. Recently, scientists at Rosatum, a Russian state-owned corporation, announced the development of a prototype plasma electric engine which they say could reduce the Martian transit time to as little as 30 days.

Russian plasma engines could get us to Mars in 30 days, scientists say

In the 1999 pilot episode of Farscape (a SYFY science fiction classic!), the fictional astronaut John Crichton, of the equally fictional International Aeronautics and Space Administration (IASA), launched into orbit aboard the Space Shuttle. Once there, he climbed into an experimental spacecraft called the Farscape-1 for what was supposed to be a quick trip around the planet.

His spacecraft was designed to use the Earth’s gravity as a slingshot to achieve incredible velocities and lay the groundwork for interstellar travel. Then he gets slurped up by a wormhole and transported across the cosmos. In the real world, scientists are working on new propulsion systems which won’t necessarily open the door to crewed interstellar travel, but which could make interplanetary travel more achievable.

Conventional rockets (the kind you see blasting off at Cape Canaveral) use a mixture of liquid hydrogen fuel and liquid oxygen oxidizer, ignited in a combustion chamber. As the fuel burns, the chemical bonds break apart and the energy released creates thrust, moving the spacecraft. If you remember Newton’s laws of motion, you’ll remember that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. As a result, the speeds you can achieve are limited by the matter flow velocity of your engine. For conventional rockets, the matter flow velocity caps out at about 2.8 miles per second.

Scientists at Rosatom, meanwhile, have built a laboratory prototype of a plasma electric engine which can achieve much faster matter flow velocities. The engine runs on hydrogen fuel, because hydrogen is light (easier to accelerate) and abundant. Rather than using an oxidizer to ignite the fuel, hydrogen particles are instead passed between two electrodes while applying a high voltage. A magnetic field is created which fires the particles out the back of the engine at speeds up to 62 miles per second.

The engine is still a work in progress, being tested in a special chamber designed to replicate the environment of space. Scientists are targeting 2030 for the first working flight model. If things go to plan, a spacecraft will be launched into orbit using conventional rockets before firing up an onboard nuclear reactor and switching over to the plasma engine. Just a month or two later, the experimental spacecraft will reach Mars just a month or two later. Hopefully, it doesn’t disappear into a wormhole in the process.