Lifeboat Foundation

Liftoff is scheduled for Thursday, April 22.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA has given SpaceX the official go-ahead for the launch of its next crew mission to the International Space Station.

That mission, called Crew-2, will blast off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 6:11 a.m. EST (1011 GMT) on Thursday morning (April 22) from NASA’s historic Pad 39A and Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It will be the second flight of this particular Crew Dragon. The capsule, named “Endeavour,” first carried NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to and from the space station last year for the Demo-2 test flight.

Starship SN15 is expected to undergo a Static Fire test as early as Tuesday to clear the path for a test flight no earlier than Wednesday as SpaceX’s rapidly reusable interplanetary launch and landing system gained a massive sign of NASA approval – and a ton of government cash to boot.

SpaceX was the sole winner of NASA’s initial Human Landing System (HLS) award worth in total more than $2.9 billion, meaning the human return to the Moon’s surface will be via Starship.

Axisymmetric reconnecting plasmoids are secondary magnetic islands, which are formed due to plasmoid instability. At high Lundquist number, the elongated current sheet becomes MHD unstable due to the plasmoid instability (Biskamp Reference Biskamp 1986; Tajima & Shibata Reference Tajima and Shibata 1997; Loureiro, Schekochihin & Cowley Reference Loureiro, Schekochihin and Cowley 2007; Bhattacharjee et al. Reference Bhattacharjee, Huang, Yang and Rogers 2009; Daughton et al. Reference Daughton, Roytershteyn, Albright, Karimabadi, Yin and Bowers 2009; Ebrahimi & Raman Reference Ebrahimi and Raman 2015; Comisso et al. Reference Comisso, Lingam, Huang and Bhattacharjee 2016), an example of spontaneous reconnection. The transition to plasmoid instability was shown to occur when the local Lundquist number $S = L V_A/\eta$ ( $V_A$ is the Alfven velocity based on the poloidal reconnecting magnetic field, $L$ is the current sheet length and $\eta$ is the magnetic diffusivity) exceeds a critical value (typically a few thousand). Our thruster concept is based on the formation of this elongated current sheet for triggering fast reconnection and plasmoid formation. Effects beyond MHD may also contribute to fast reconnection as the current sheet width ( $\delta _{\mathrm {sp}}$) becomes smaller than the two-fluid or kinetic scales (Cassak, Shay & Drake Reference Cassak, Shay and Drake 2005; Ji & Daughton Reference Ji and Daughton 2011). However, for thruster application we desire system-size MHD plasmoid formation (with radius ranging from a few to tens of centimetres), where kinetic effects become subdominant for low-temperature plasma (in the range of a few eV to a couple of tens of eV). Here, the MHD plasmoid-mediated reconnection occurs at high Lundquist number (about $10⁴$ and above), which is achieved at high magnetic field rather than low magnetic diffusivity (or high temperature). To form a single or multiple X-point reconnection site, oppositely directed biased magnetic field (in the range of 20–1000 G) is injected through a narrow gap in an annular device. We find that the plasmoid structures demonstrated in resistive (or extended) MHD simulations produce high exhaust velocity and thrust that scale favourably with applied magnetic field. It will be shown that the fluid-like magnetic plasmoid loops continuously depart the magnetic configuration about every $10 \ \mathrm {\mu } \textrm {s}$ with Alfvenic velocities in the range of 20 to $500\ \textrm {km}\ \textrm {s}^{-1}$, and the thrust does not ideally depend on the mass of the ion species of the plasma.

Figure 1 shows the main parts of the reconnecting plasmoid thruster in an annular configuration. Magnetic helicity injection starts with an initial injector poloidal field ( $B^{\mathrm {inj}}_P$, in blue, with radial, $R$, and vertical, $Z$, components), connecting the inner and outer biased plates in the injector region. Gas is injected and partially ionized by applying an injector voltage $V_{\mathrm {inj}}$ of a few hundred volts between the inner and outer plates (indicated by numbers 1 and 2), which also drives a current $I_{\mathrm {inj}}$ along the open magnetic field lines. Plasma and open field lines expand into the vessel when the Lorentz force $J_{\mathrm {pol}} \times B_{\phi }$ exceeds the field line tension of the injector poloidal field. The azimuthal ( $\phi$) field shown here, $B_{\phi }$, is generated through injector current ( $I_{\mathrm {inj}}$) alone (by applying $V_{\mathrm {inj}}$), or can be provided externally.

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Elon Musk’s SpaceX plans to send civilians into low-Earth orbit this year. Virgin Galactic is training space travellers. Companies aim to open hotels in space, and offer space day trips, within a few years. We assess the state of play in the nascent space tourism industry.

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