Portal Space Systems sammelt 17,5 Millionen US -Dollar für hochmanövrierbare Supernova -Raumschiffe unter Verwendung eines Solar -Wärmeantriebs

I found this really interesting as I’d not heard of Solar Thermal Propulsion before but it sort of makes sense. Rather than using solar energy in the form of a solar sail which is very low propulsion or using the solar cells to convert that into electricity first, this is presumably using large mirrored surfaces to focus the sun’s light down to some component that is going to heat up and use that heat energy directly to heat up a gas (likely in the form of some thermal battery). They claim that performance can be similar to that of nuclear thermal propulsion but without all the cost of managing a high temperature nuclear reactor pile in the middle of an engine. It feels like something the military would absolutely love as they want more maneuverable spacecraft but there’s generally no good physics way of getting that without just shipping up a ton of fuel.