Bicycle Racing In Space Could Be A Thing

July 11, 2017 by Steven Dufresne 100 Comments

It’s 2100 AD, and hackers and normals live together in mile-long habitats in the Earth-Moon system. The habitat is spun up so that the gravity inside is that of Earth, and for exercise, the normals cycle around on bike paths. But the hackers do their cycling outside, in the vacuum of space.

How so? With ion thrusters, rocketing out xenon gas as the propellant. And the source of power? Ultimately that’s the hackers’ legs, pedaling away at a drive system that turns two large Wimshurst machines.

Those Wimshurst machines then produce the high voltage needed for the thruster’s ionization as well as the charge flow. They’re also what gives the space bike it’s distinctly bicycle-like appearance. And based on the calculations below, this may someday work!

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Expanding Horizons With The Ion Propelled Lifter

July 13, 2016 by Steven Dufresne 39 Comments

Like many people, going through university followed an intense career building period was a dry spell in terms of making things. Of course things settled down and I finally broke that dry spell to work on what I called “non-conventional propulsion”.

I wanted to stay away from the term “anti-gravity” because I was enough of a science nut to know that such a thing was dubious. But I also suspected that there might be science principles yet to be discovered. I was willing to give it a try anyway, and did for a few years. It was also my introduction to the world of high voltage… DC. Everything came out null though, meaning that any effects could be accounted for by some form of ionization or Coulomb force. At no time did I get anything to actually fly, though there was a lot of spinning things on rotors or weight changes on scales and balances due to ion propulsion.

So when a video appeared in 2001 from a small company called Transdimensional Technologies of a triangle shaped, aluminum foil and wire thing called a lifter that actually propelled itself off the table, I immediately had to make one. I’d had enough background by then to be confident that it was flying using ion propulsion. And in fact, given my background I was able to put an enhancement in my first version that others came up with only later.

Lifter parts

Lifter flying

For those who’ve never seen a lifter, it’s extremely simple. Think of it as a very leaky capacitor. One electrode is an aluminum foil skirt, in the shape of a triangle. Spaced apart from that around an inch or so away, usually using 1/6″ balsa wood sticks, is a very thin bare wire (think 30AWG) also shaped as a triangle. High voltage is applied between the foil skirt and the wire. The result is that a downward jet of air is created around and through the middle of the triangle and the lifter flies up off the table. But that is just the barest explanation of how it works. We must go deeper!

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Paddy Neumann’s Bounce Per Ounce Is Better Than NASA’s

January 4, 2016 by Brandon Dunson 51 Comments

[Paddy Neumann] is an Australian physicist and founder of Neumann Space, a space start-up with a record-breaking ion drive.

The team at Neumann Space built an ion engine that broke the previous specific impulse (bounce per ounce) record. NASA’s HIPEP thruster previously held this record with a specific impulse of ~9600 seconds (+/- 200 seconds). The Neumann Drive’s specific impulse as recorded by the University of Sydney was ~14,690 seconds (+/- 2,000 seconds). This all equates to better efficiency by the Neumann Drive, however its acceleration does not match that of the HIPEP.

CathodeGraphic — Simplified ion engine diagram courtesy of Neumann Space

The Neumann Drive has another unique advantage in its range of usable fuels. In comparison to the HIPEP which uses Xenon gas as fuel the Neumann Drive accepts a variety of metals including: Molybdenum, Magnesium, Aluminum, Carbon, Titanium, Vanadium, Tin, last and also least according to Neumann Space is Bismuth.

Interestingly, Neumann offered his intellectual property (IP) to the University of Sydney, since the research was done at the University but they passed on the offer. This allowed the IP to be returned to Paddy and he subsequently applied for a patent and began the search for funding for continued research.

Here at Hackaday we like space, in fact we’ve offered to send you to space more than once with the Hackaday Prize. We also enjoy amateur rocketry and young rocket scientists.

Ion Propelled Tie Fighter Now Has A Laser!

February 15, 2014 by James Hobson 9 Comments

ion

[Steven Dufresne] has been playing around with ion propulsion using high voltage lately, and he’s added another spaceship to his experiments — Darth Vader’s TIE Fighter — and as an added bonus, he’s thrown on a laser too!

We originally covered his Ion Wind Propelled Star Trek Enterprise a few months ago, after someone had mentioned that the ion winds he was generating in experiments kind of looked like the warp drives on the Enterprise. Well, someone else pointed out that a TIE Fighter was an even better candidate for this. After all, TIE stands for Twin Ion Engines. So he decided to build one too. The ion winds look even better on this one as he’s turned the entire back of the fighter into the electrode, which creates a wide and very visible arc.

Oh, he also decided to add lasers to it for some extra flare — unfortunately TIE Fighters used green lasers — not red ones. Stick around for the following videos to see the TIE Fighter in all its ionic glory.

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