9 – Riding Ions (feat. Joe Cassady)

Play Episode (38:15)

Electric vehicles aren’t just taking over our roads – they’re taking over our orbits, too! Solar electric propulsion is a cutting edge technology that allows spacecraft to change velocity up to an order of magnitude more efficiently than traditional chemical rockets. Joe Cassady from Aerojet Rocketdyne and Explore Mars talks with us about how this propulsion works, it’s power requirements, the development status, and how we’ll use it to eventually send cargo to Mars in support of human exploration.

Links

• Aerojet Rocketdyne
• Explore Mars
• NASA Press Release on SEP Development Contract
• Joe debates Robert Zubrin “When should we go to Mars?” at H2M 2016
• Joe’s Twitter Account
• Further info from NASAspaceflight.com on SEP

WeMartians Theme Song is “RetroFuture” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/