- This little thruster could be the Tesla for space travel.
Yes, I know Elon Musk launched a Tesla car into space,
but it won't really be able to move on its own
because, well, as I learned from Mario Kart
the roads in space are very poorly maintained.
If like me, you'd like to drive in space like Mario
and Starman, make sure you click like and subscribe.
It won't actually get you off the planet,
but it will get you to see more of my videos.
Anyway, just like there are electric cars
there are electric thrusters for spaceships.
These MIT students are testing a new way
of using electric thrusters that could unlock
our entire solar system.
- We need to work on very different technologies
for the future of space flights.
- We are going to see if it's working.
- Separation in 3, 2, 1, go.
- Why do this?
Rockets are an old technology-
and I mean old.
And while they're great for getting out
of Earth's gravity well,
they're not practical for going to the outer planets.
- There are about a million large asteroids
in the asteroid belt, and we've visited, you know
maybe 10 of them-
so we know basically nothing.
- This new breed of electric thrusters
could allow us to explore deep space
even sooner than you expect.
- When people learn about electric propulsion
people get excited, you know.
Not only because of the sci-fi aspect of it,
but the development of these technologies,
they are democratizing space so
that more people can actually contribute.
- How soon will these electric thrusters unlock
our solar system?
This is "Hard Reset."
A series about rebuilding our world from scratch.
Rockets state back to about the 13th century A.D.
and they generally use, hopefully, highly
controlled explosions to move things around.
Freeman Dyson once actually proposed using
nuclear bombs to propel a spaceship.
Fun, right?
- Early space flight exploration was pretty much brute force
and the only way you can get to the Moon is building
the biggest rocket anyone could ever dream of.
- This is Gustav Peterson, a Ph.D. student at MIT.
Even though you can't really be an engineer at birth,
he comes pretty close.
- When I was a kid, I would sit in our basement
and destroy all of my toys, right?
I would just take them apart and try to make them better
which usually made them not work anymore.
At the same time, my dad is a aerospace engineer,
and I think that's what brought me here.
- With the guidance of Paulo Lozano, Director
of the Space Propulsion Lab at MIT,
Gustav has spent the past three years developing
a new way to use electric thrusters.
Specifically, these guys: electrospray thrusters.
- There are many forms of electric propulsion:
Gridded-ion thrusters and Hall-effect thrusters
as the real mainstay of space flight.
But the electrospray has come up
as a sort of inherently microscale technology.
- Electrospray thrusters are small
and energy efficient.
How small?
Like you need a microscope to really see what's up.
- So this is the actual thruster itself,
and it's comprised of 480 individual tips in this array.
And then once the thruster chip-
which is this little sandwich-
is fully assembled,
we'll place it on a propellant tank
so it has an electrical connection as well
as a reserve of propellant, and then it's ready to fly.
- This it bitty thing is the thruster and the fuel tank.
Yeah, it's that small.
Also, this is Mia.
She's the one who's making them at the moment.
So if this were a Star Trek,
she'd kind of be like Mr. Scotty?
- I'm one of many Mr. Scottys.
- So modest.
This cute little thruster works by using electric fields
to shoot ions out very very quickly.
Because of its size and energy requirements
it's perfect for something like a CubeSat.
- And it's to the point now where it works really well,
but not forever.
And so, the lifetime of an electrospray is quite limited.
- But at the same time, the thruster head
is the smallest component of the propulsion system.
It's like a postage stamp-size.
We say, "Hey, why can't we bring fresh thrusters
to continue the mission?"
- Since these thrusters
don't have super long lifespans,
Gustav and Professor Lozano are working on a way to
stack these thrusters and use them to send CubeSats
to the asteroid belt-
and we are gonna see one of their first tests later today.
- So that you run a set of thrusters
and then when their lifetime is spent, they get ejected,
and you continue the mission on the next set of thrusters,
and we're gonna hopefully show
that we can fire all of these three stages,
and do the stage separation successfully.
- This mission that we're planning is called Step One,
and this mission is a three-use spacecraft
that is planning to flight in 2024.
What we're going to see in the laboratory today
is that demonstration using the engineering model
which is pretty much identical
to what we're going to use in flight.
- Eventually, electrospray thrusters might have
long enough lifespans to take probes anywhere
in the solar system, but there's no telling how long
it'll take for the technology to get to that point.
- So instead of waiting for the electrospray
to continue maturing, we can say,
"Hey, let's build a stack of several of them
and we can go, you know, say in five years
to the asteroid belt."
- By just bringing a bunch of spare thrusters,
we could jump ahead
to exploring the asteroid belt and beyond
in as soon as a few years.
You might still be unclear
why electric thrusts are such a good idea.
Well, look at this:
This is a model of the Saturn V,
still one of the most powerful rockets ever made,
and this teeny tiny part at the top
is the entire payload for this rocket.
All the rest of this is basically just explosives
that you could blow up and shoot out the back of the rocket.
- The main difference between chemical
and electric is the amount of propellant.
And in general, a chemical rocket
will use significantly more propellant.
What that means is that if you have a little satellite
and use a chemical rocket, most of your satellite
is going to be propellant which is not good
because what you really want to do is have a useful payload,
a scientific instrument or a computer.
Electric propulsion actually has the benefit of maximizing
the amount of room that you have on a spacecraft
so you can use it for this useful payload,
as opposed to just propellant.
- So with electric thrusters,
you don't need nearly as much stuff
to shoot out the back of your ship.
You still need an energy source,
but you can get that from solar panels
or maybe nuclear fission or even fusion in the future.
- We can build spacecraft that are much smaller
and therefore we can either go further,
or fly more missions with the same amount of money.
- Sometimes we call this the "democratization of space"
which is basically giving access
to more people to participate in this very exciting area.
- In the past, they cost you at least a billion dollars
to make a spacecraft that went into space.
If I say, "Hey, you can go into deep space
for a million dollars instead,"
that is a completely different avenue for exploration.
- NASA's Dawn and Dart missions
both used electric thrusters
and many satellites orbiting their Earth do as well,
and an MIT's lab I even got to fire an electric thruster too
but they wouldn't let me go very fast.
- So all we actually have to do is type whatever
voltage we want to apply.
Maybe start with, say, 750.
- Million?
- Oh, no, no, no.
- But even though electric thrusters
were great in space, it's unlikely
they'll ever be strong enough to do the job
of lifting an object from the surface of the Earth
up into orbit.
- All right. How much force does this emit?
- Like the weight of a mosquito?
- Yeah, electric thrusters are super, super weak compared
to chemical rockets, but they can work for much longer.
This is one of those
classic 'tortoise and the hare' kind of situations.
- Once you're in space,
there's only this minuscule amount of drag slowing us down,
and with only a small amount of force, you can just very,
very carefully push your spacecraft
over the duration of a really long timescale.
- For example,
one of the most advanced rockets ever made, a Falcon Heavy,
uses all its fuel in like, 10 minutes.
But electric thrusters can work for months,
maybe even years or longer,
as the technology improves.
So that tiny amount of acceleration builds up over time
and moves you much faster than a chemical rocket could.
That's where Gustav's test comes in.
Current thrusters won't get us to the asteroid belt,
but if we can stack them, we can leapfrog ahead
in terms of how far this technology can take us.
- So we have these three pucks that each have thrusters
on them, and we're gonna mount this
in a gravity offloading rig where we can release the stages
without crashing into the table.
What we're doing today is we're putting the whole thing
together for the first time, and if this works, we're done.
- We're ready for you, sir.
- Well, let's get going.
So this guy should be safe to plug in.
Looks good on here.
Yeah. First stage works.
- First stage is working.
- Separation in 3, 2, 1, go.
- Woo. Sorry.
- Second staging in 3, 2, 1.
Go.
Yes.
Nice.
All right.
- Mia, my lab mate, said that this was the happiest
she's ever seen me,
and we've been colleagues for three and a half years.
It's a huge weight of your shoulders
when you see it finally come together.
- This tech could mean that deep space probes
won't be something we do every decade or so.
You can quickly open the door
to full exploration of the inner planets
and eventually the outer planets as well.
So how will this impact our future?
So, picture a scenario
where we can move around in space.
Satellites orbiting Earth could potentially stay
in orbit indefinitely with airbreathing engines.
That's right.
There is actually a little bit of air in space
at low orbits, not a lot but enough
to add drag that slows things like the ISS down.
That tiny amount of air could be used as a propellant
by electric thrusters that would allow them
to keep objects in space indefinitely.
And versatile options for space propulsion
could allow us to make robots that clean up space debris
and prevent catastrophes like a Kessler syndrome.
- With electric propulsion, we can make really simple,
small propulsion systems that we can add to satellites for,
you know, relatively small additional costs.
And now all of a sudden, instead of having
just a thousand objects randomly going there,
we can control their orbits.
- But the real thing here is exploration,
opening the rest of our solar system to human understanding.
- With just a little bit of technology that is coming
very soon, it will be possible to explore space
for a university or a startup, maybe even a small group
of friends with someone who made it big on bitcoins, right?
So, I think what I really want is that
space exploration, for the people, isn't only a dream,
but it's also something that you can actually
actively participate in.
- So if you have a bright idea, you want to explore,
you want to contribute to this activity,
I think that that is possible.
So don't leave it just as a dream.
I think that the participation now is possible because
of things that are happening right now in places like this.
- The asteroid belt
and the outer planets are vast treasure troves
of knowledge that we've yet to unlock.
But once this technology matures,
they're something we'll be able to chart
and explore for the very first time.
- If we make asteroid belt exploration so cheap
that it makes sense as a commercial entity
to build a spacecraft to explore the asteroid belt
to find resources, it will be like a gold rush.
- The resources we need to build ships
that can leave our solar system and carry humanity
to the stars may already be in space,
floating in the asteroid belt,
just waiting for us to find them.
These little thrusters could help us find everything
we need to reach other planets,
and build totally new worlds from scratch.
- Empire strikes back when it starts:
There were all these probes that come out
and they start going to different destinations.
That's what we want to do, but not with the dark side.
- That's an important stipulation.
- Yes.
- Although the funding's easier, I hear
for the dark side. - Yeah, exactly.
- A lot better funding.