Costa Rican Aerospace Consortium Inks Contract
by Rod Hughes
It may not be any threat to Boeing yet, but a new consortium, Costa Rican Aerospace Alliance (Coraal), has signed a contract with Ad Astro Rockets to build a platform on which to test Dr. Franklin Chang’s plasma rocket engine, the daily La Nacion reported late last week.
Made up of six Costa Rican businessmen, the new firm will build a rectangual table-like structure to unite the rocket engine, its electrical and cooling systems and tie them in with the International Space Station still under construction. The engine, designed to free space rockets from costly and bulky chemical fuels, is the brainchild of Chang, a Costa Rican astronaut and physicist. The Coraal project will initially employ 187 persons.
The plasma engine prototype has been deveoped at Ad Astra’s facilities in Guanacaste province near Liberia. Chang told the press that, once the engine is tested in a vacuum at Ad Astra’s facilities in Houston, it would be ready to be hoisted up to the space station with a conventional rocket. Essentially, the engine heats a gas to such a temperature that an electron is released.
By being freed from the tyranny of chemical fuels, the engine will not only be cheaper to run but will accellerate more rapidly and make interplanetary (and later interstellar) flight more feasible. Chang thinks the more immediate use will be to hoist satellites into orbit or cargo to space stations. One suggested scheme on earth is to incinerate dangerous refuse and turn it into useful byproducts.