- NASA wants to send astronauts to Mars in the 2030s. But with current technology, the journey will take years.
- That’s why NASA invested in a new type of rocket that could shorten the journey to just 2 months.
- Limiting the time astronauts spend in space is critical to their health.
NASA has invested $725,000 in a new rocket system that could solve one of the biggest hurdles to sending humans to Mars: travel time.
With current technology, a return trip to the red planet would take nearly two years. For astronauts, spending that much time in space poses major health risks.
They would be exposed to high levels of solar and cosmic radiation, the damaging effects of weightlessness and a long period of isolation.
Space radiation is probably the biggest threat. Astronauts who spend just six months in space are exposed to about the same amount of radiation as 1,000 chest X-rays, putting them at risk for cancer, nervous system damage, bone loss and heart disease, according to NASA.
The best way to reduce radiation exposure and other adverse health effects is to shorten the length of the trip, Troy Howe, president of Howe Industries, told Business Insider. That’s why he’s partnered with NASA to develop the Pulsed Plasma Rocket (PPR), a new rocket system that could shorten a roundtrip to Mars to just two months.
This technology “has the potential to revolutionize space travel,” NASA wrote in a statement, and could one day even take humans beyond Mars.
How a rocket can take us to Mars and back in 2 months
The PPR is a propulsion system that uses pulses of superheated plasma to generate high thrust very efficiently. It is currently in phase two of development, funded by the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Program.
This Phase 2 study, which begins this month, focuses on optimizing the engine design, conducting proof-of-concept experiments, and designing a PPR-powered, shielded spacecraft for crewed missions to Mars.
The big advantage of the PPR is that it can make a spacecraft go really, really fast. It has both high thrust and high specific impulse. Specific impulse is how fast a rocket engine generates thrust, and thrust is the force that moves the spacecraft.
The PPR generates 10,000 newtons of thrust at a specific impulse of 5,000 seconds. That means a PPR-equipped spacecraft carrying four to six passengers could travel about 100,000 miles per hour, Howe told BI via email.
A spacecraft flying that fast would eventually have to slow down to reach its destination. Howe said the company has taken into account the extra energy and fuel needed to land on Mars.
Even after phase two is complete, it will be a few decades before the PPR is ready to launch astronauts to the Red Planet. But once it is available for spaceflight, Howe hopes this technology will greatly expand the reach of human space exploration, and perhaps even aid missions to Pluto someday.
“You can achieve pretty much anything you want in the solar system if we have this technology up and running in 20 years,” he said.