AD Astra Rocket

Ad Astra Rocket Company (AARC) is a spaceflight engineering company dedicated to the development of advanced plasma rocket propulsion technology. The company is developing the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR^®) and its associated technologies.
The company is located 3 miles to the West of the NASA Johnson Space Center, and about 25 miles to the South of the city of Houston, TX. AARC was incorporated on January 14th, 2005 and officially organized on the 15th of July of 2005.
Dr. Franklin R. Chang Díaz serves as company President and CEO. Dr. Chang Díaz invented the VASIMR^® concept and has been working on its development since 1979, starting at The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory in Cambridge Massachusetts and continuing at the MIT Plasma Fusion Center before moving the project to the Johnson Space Center in 1994.
In the development of the VASIMR^® engine, Ad Astra Rocket Company has collaborated with NASA Johnson Space Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, University of Texas at Austin, University of Houston and various other government space and research centers, industrial companies and academic organizations, including foreign universities.

The VX-200 will provide the critical data set to build the VF-200-1, the first flight unit, to be tested in space aboard the International Space Station (ISS). It will consist of two 100 kW units with opposite magnetic dipoles, resulting in a zero-torque magnetic system. The electrical energy will come from ISS at low power level, be stored in batteries and used to fire the engine at 200 kW. The VF-200-1 project will serve as a “pathfinder” for the ISS National Laboratory by demonstrating a new class of larger, more complex science and technology payloads

Ad Astra Ponders Vasimr Mission To Asteroid

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Ad Astra Rocket Co. is assessing a cooperative unmanned rendezvous mission to a yet-to-be-selected asteroid with a spacecraft and scientific payload powered by the experimental Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (Vasimr), according to Franklin Chang-Diaz, the seven-time space shuttle astronaut who serves as the company’s CEO and president.
Ad Astra’s efforts come against the backdrop of President Barack Obama’s recently announced plans for NASA to begin working toward a manned asteroid rendezvous, circa 2025, that would mark humanity’s first foray beyond the Moon (AW&ST April 19, p. 28).
On Sept. 30, 2009, the company’s VX-200, a two-stage, 200-kw. prototype of the Vasimr, reached full-power plasma thrust under the control of a superconducting magnetin vacuum conditions. The achievement marked a critical milestone in a long-running effort by Chang-Diaz to develop an electric propulsion drive that could one day transport humans to Mars in 39 days.
The VX-200 is a demonstrator for a flight version of the rocket, the VF-200‑1, that Ad Astra now expects to launch to the International Space Station in mid-2014 for further testing, under provisions designating the U.S. segment of the station as a national laboratory. A successful deployment of the VF-200-1 would free Ad Astra to furnish a backup plasma drive, the VF-200-2, for an asteroid mission in partnership with NASA. The Boeing Co. would provide a high-efficiency, lightweight solar power source developed for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Fast Access Spacecraft Test­bed program for a mission launching a year later.
“This is all very new stuff we are discussing,” says Chang-Diaz. “The point is we have not really quite decided what to do with the second engine,” he says. “Once the first engine is up and flying, we are thinking maybe the second engine could be used in another spacecraft, a free-flyer of some sort.”
Ad Astra was incorporated five years ago to advance the development of electric space plasma propulsion started by Chang-Diaz while he was a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and nurtured while he served in NASA’s astronaut corps between 1980 and 2005. Since leaving the space agency, Chang-Diaz has pursued commercial development under a series of Space Act agreements.
Ad Astra’s strategy is to graduate from the municipal power grid as a source of electricity to space solar power demonstrations. The ultimate goal is a 200-megawatt space nuclear reactor as the source of electricity to generate the plasma thrust for fast missions to Mars. The company would develop and lease the plasma rockets for missions that range from satellite-servicing and orbital debris removal to slinging spacecraft on accelerated deep space missions with scientific payloads and human explorers.
A mission to the red planet that is shorter than two months could reduce the health risks to astronauts posed by cosmic and solar radiation as well as the weakened bones and muscles they experience during prolonged weightlessness. Missions to Jupiter would be cut to three years from six.
Political, professional and even public interest in Ad Astra has ballooned in the aftermath of the VX-200’s success, the report in October by the panel led by former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine to assess NASA’s post-shuttle-era strategy and 2011 budget that Obama presented to Congress on Feb. 1. The controversial spending plan cancels NASA’s Constellation back-to-the-Moon program in favor of an extended, multibillion-dollar research and development initiative that would lay the groundwork for a flexible path of exploration to destinations including near-Earth asteroids and comets, Mars and its moons as well as the Earth’s Moon.
Space station operations would be extended from 2016 until at least 2020 as well, and NASA would increase funding for research.