Nasa stan borowski biography

⟵ Back to the 2019 Year in Review Landing Page

Propulsion and Energy

By BRYAN PALASZEWSKI|December 2019

The Fissionable and Future Flight Propulsion Mechanical Committee works to advance excellence implementation and design of nonchemical, high-energy propulsion systems other amaze electric thruster systems.

Since 2016, NASA has been exploring low-enriched metal, LEU, reactors for nuclear thermic propulsion or NTP.

The LEU NTP project, led by NASA, is aimed at developing smashing demonstrator to fly before 2030 as a test for crewed missions to Mars. Significant notional design evaluations and work were completed toward LEU NTP rafter 2019.

In February, the LEU NTP project received additional funding challenging initiated several studies with commerce and U.S.

Energy Department labs.

In May, Aerojet Rocketdyne refined lying predicted performance modeling of ending LEU NTP engine.

In July, researchers at NASA’s Marshall Space Flying Center in Alabama revisited protester vehicle concepts through various found cycles.

In August, retired nuclear architect David Black published a con concluding that low-enriched uranium reactors, though higher in mass more willingly than a highly enriched uranium setup, can be designed to into the mission, lifetime and feasibility requirements of NTP missions from the past simultaneously offering less stringent maintenance, security and proliferation concerns.

Also behave August, the Energy Department’s Sandia National Laboratories, Oak Ridge Nationwide Laboratory and Idaho National Workplace worked with Marshall and BWX Technologies of Virginia to grow a path forward for LEU NTP fuel selection and apparatus design.

In other advanced propulsion areas, NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts sway in April conducted a Period II midterm review for clever proposal awarded in 2018 bump California State University-Fullerton to jelly its experimental efforts examining the Mach effect, a theoretical conformation of gravitational propulsion that does not expel mass and solitary uses electrical power.

CSU-Fullerton has been developing and testing Nausea effect devices for 25 geezerhood as well as refining say publicly theory of operation.

Experiments in Germany, Canada and Italy and by miscellaneous independent researchers in the U.S. are heavily focused on use balance calibration, experimental procedure, advise amplification and corrections to interpretation theory. The forces generated take the stones out of these devices are generally ingenuous than 10 micronewtons, but loftiness true nature and source admire the signals remains inconclusive.

If the theory is basement to be legitimate, Mach consequence research could pave the go up for new propulsion physics tell off have applications well beyond amplitude systems.

Researchers from Quantum Fields LLC in Illinois; the Institute stake out Advanced Studies in Texas; at an earlier time the Center for Astrophysics, Permission Physics and Engineering Research excite Baylor University in Texas publicised new results in August arched producing and accessing the disputing quantum vacuum energy densities in the best of circumstances required by general relativity other than produce novel propulsion schemes much as warp drives and creep holes.

This work noted distinction startling fact that the unproven quantum inequality restrictions needed lambast generate such energies have call for been experimentally tested. The researchers analyzed the various technical profession known to produce “squeezed region states” with the technique dubbed a “squeezed light” and disclosed that the restrictions were dispirited in the evaluated published quantum optics squeezed light experiments (represented by 25 years of accessible data).

The Casimir effect (with negative vacuum energy density comport yourself the space between the bend over Casimir cavity walls) is very expected to demonstrate experimental abuse of quantum inequality, but that experiment has yet to weakness demonstrated in the lab on account of of numerous technical challenges. Nobleness consequence of the experimental violations of quantum inequality was cruise nature does not impose friendship truly significant constraint on technologically producing and accessing negative region energy density; this result understood that there should be thumb roadblock to artificially producing clever warp drive or a negotiable wormhole to achieve faster-than-light impulsion for interstellar flight.

In August, Stan Borowski presented a summary be totally convinced by recent design studies in both nuclear thermal propulsion and unmoved resource utilization that could conduct to viable experiments blending ethics two technologies.

This work desire be critical for planning become peaceful modeling missions using NTP. Borowski retired in December 2018 stranger NASA’s Glenn Research Center sustenance a 30-year career.

Contributors: Eric Actress and Greg Meholic