Scientist eyes 39-day trip to Mars
A journey from Earth to Mars could eventually take just 39 days - nearly six times faster than the current travel time - according to a rocket scientist who has the ear of NASA.
Franklin Chang-Diaz, a former astronaut and a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), says reaching the Red Planet could be dramatically quicker using his high-tech VASIMR rocket, now on track for lift-off after decades of development.
The Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket is fast becoming a centrepiece of NASA's future strategy as it looks to private firms to help meet the astronomical costs of space exploration.
NASA, still reeling from a political decision to cancel its Constellation program that would have returned a human to the moon by the end of the decade, has called on firms to provide new technology to power rovers or even future manned missions.
Hopes are now pinned on firms like Mr Chang-Diaz's Texas-based Ad Astra Rocket Company.
"In the early days ... NASA support for the project was rather minimal because the agency did not emphasise advanced technologies as much as it's doing now," Mr Chang-Diaz said.
NASA was focused instead on the series of Apollo missions that delivered men to the moon for the first, and so far last, times.
"They were mesmerised by the Apollo days and lived in the Apollo era for 40 years, and they just forgot developing something new," he said.
Mr Chang-Diaz, 60, hopes that "something" is a non-chemical rocket that eventually allows for a manned trip to Mars.
His rocket would use electricity to transform a fuel - likely hydrogen, helium or deuterium - into plasma gas that is heated to 11 million degrees Celsius.
The plasma gas is then channeled into tailpipes using magnetic fields to propel the spacecraft.
That would send a shuttle hurtling toward the moon or Mars at ever faster speeds up to an estimated 55 kilometres per second until the engines are reversed.
The distance between the Earth and Mars varies between 55 million and 400 million kilometres depending on their points of orbit.