LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Spacecraft Propulsion
built 222 days ago
Wickman Spacecraft & Propulsion Company (WSPC) is designing a responsive and low cost SLV that uses a unique solid rocket motor that gives the SLV versatile performance and low cost. The SLV's propellant is WSPC's high performance, environmentally friendly, low cost, phase stabilized ammonium nitrate (PSAN) space booster propellant. Its unique SLV solid rocket motors provide real time controllable thrust with a unique expansion-deflection (E-D) exit cone. The E-D exit cone concept has been verified by CFD analysis and solid rocket motor static firings (shown lower left). The E-D exit cone ... provides optimum expansion of the exhaust gases at all altitudes. This enables WSPC's SLV to be ground launched or air launched (shown right).
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Spacecraft Propulsion – The action or process of imparting motion to a spacecraft by means of a force such as a thrust of air or energy released by burning fuel. NASA Thesaurus, Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
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Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced that construction was under way on the first large space simulator in the United States capable of testing full-scale spacecraft of the Ranger and Mariner classes. Three primary space effects could be simulated: solar radiation, cold space heat sink, and a high vacuum equivalent to about one part in a billion of the atmospheric pressure at sea level.
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Cosmic plasmas contain energy which may be tapped and used for spacecraft propulsion. The energy needed for launching a spacecraft could be supplied to it from the ground through a plasma channel in the atmosphere.
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In December 2002, when France's Stentor satellite was all set to use electric propulsion for stationkeeping, ESA's SMART-1 was just completing its first end-to-end spacecraft test. Then Stentor was lost in the Ariane-5 launch failure, making SMART-1 the first and only technology demonstration mission with Hall-effect plasma propulsion. As a result, there was a great deal of interest in the electric propulsion community in SMART-1's flight.
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MINNEAPOLIS, Aug. 7 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Alliant Techsystems ATK composite and propulsion technologies supported the successful launch of the Delta II rocket carrying NASA's Phoenix Mars lander spacecraft. The Phoenix Mars lander spacecraft is the first of NASA's Scout missions. The Phoenix is designed to analyze the ice and soil samples retrieved by the robotic arm from the Martian arctic's ice-rich soil.
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