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In 2001, Shawyer founded Satellite Propulsion Research Ltd, to work on the EmDrive, which he said used a resonant cavity to produce thrust without propellant.The company was backed by a SMART award grant from the UK Department of Trade and Industry.
A reactionless drive is a hypothetical device producing motion without the exhaust of a propellant.A propellantless drive is not necessarily reactionless when it constitutes an open system interacting with external fields; but a reactionless drive is a particular case of a propellantless drive that is a closed system, presumably in contradiction with the law of conservation of momentum.
Atmosphere-breathing electric propulsion, or air-breathing electric propulsion, shortly ABEP, [1] is a propulsion technology for spacecraft, which could allow thrust generation in low orbits without the need of on-board propellant, by using residual gases in the atmosphere as propellant. Atmosphere-breathing electric propulsion could make a new ...
Field propulsion is the concept of spacecraft propulsion where no propellant is necessary but instead momentum of the spacecraft is changed by an interaction of the spacecraft with external force fields, such as gravitational and magnetic fields from stars and planets.
Magnetic sail animation. A magnetic sail is a proposed method of spacecraft propulsion where an onboard magnetic field source interacts with a plasma wind (e.g., the solar wind) to form an artificial magnetosphere (similar to Earth's magnetosphere) that acts as a sail, transferring force from the wind to the spacecraft requiring little to no propellant as detailed for each proposed magnetic ...
[1] However, due to energy losses caused by late time ablation and rapid conductive heat transfer from the propellant to the rest of the spacecraft, propulsive efficiency (kinetic energy of exhaust / total energy used) is very low compared to other forms of electric propulsion, at around just 10%.
The Tsiolkovsky rocket equation shows that for a rocket with a given empty mass and a given amount of propellant, the total change in velocity it can accomplish is proportional to the effective exhaust velocity. A spacecraft without propulsion follows an orbit determined by its trajectory and any gravitational field.
Propellant is injected at the upstream side of the thruster body. In cases where the propellant used is not gaseous (e.g., alkali metals) at the local temperature, the propellant must be vaporized. [1] Gaseous propellant is ionized by one of the following methods: bombarding the propellant with electrons emitted by a hot cathode or by an ...