/sci/ - Science & Math

>>14602972
Just take the reactor weight and divide it by the power in watts, or vice versa since both terms are used. By making the reactor really light you can make electric propulsion have far greater acceleration and delta-v than it would in reality. This is root of the VASIMR scam, their figure was 1 kg/kWe and we're nowhere close to achieving that. The person who was helping Franklin Chang Díaz come up with this later got arrested for defrauding NASA on an unrelated matter.

From a nuclear engineer on NSF, granted this was only 200 kWe and it was proposed in early 2000s but it's probably the most fair comparison.
>Internal numbers I saw had Prometheus at >100 kg/kWe when they cancelled the program. The program was sold to NASA administration at ~20 kg/kWe, which made the application of NEP much more attractive. As the alpha headed south, so did the applicability of the technology to interplanetary missions.