In April this year we demonstrated reliable thruster operation using real asteroid metal as the fuel, obtained from a metallic meteorite sample. This proved that our thruster can be refuelled from resources already found in space and is an extremely exciting result.
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We are paving the way to using space resources as fuel for our thrusters. This is at the heart of the decision to use solid-state metal fuels which can be easily harvested from Near Earth Asteroids.
Reliable propulsion systems are critical to the future of scientific, educational and commercial space missions, and in the future in-space refuelling will enable all of these missions to go much further and accomplish more.
SSP’s metal fuelled thruster is the first step in this plan. Extracting and refuelling with metals found on asteroids will also enable the harvesting of these materials for other purposes and lay the foundations for a new space industry.
Our solid state design completely removes the mass penalty of propellant tanks, the unreliability of miniaturized valves and the volume constraints of storing low density fuels.
