Electrifying spacecraft propulsion

Neil Wallace, electric propulsion engineer

Electric propulsion has been around for a long time –1920s rocket pioneer Robert Goddard wrote about it. Perhaps it was an idea ahead of its time, because when I got into the space industry the thinking was that chemical thrusters were good enough, certainly for telecom missions. The platforms were small, working lifetimes were limited, power availability was constrained – and electronics didn’t last that long then either. All that started to change around the turn of the century, with a creeping up of mass, lifetime and power that made the various electric propulsion technologies more attractive.