{"id":250251,"date":"2016-11-30T11:38:00","date_gmt":"2016-11-30T15:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/?guid=b6577bb75a12128a8035a2d30f271819"},"modified":"2016-11-30T11:38:00","modified_gmt":"2016-11-30T15:38:00","slug":"electrifying-spacecraft-propulsion-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/?p=250251","title":{"rendered":"Electrifying spacecraft propulsion"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.esa.int\/var\/esa\/storage\/images\/esa_multimedia\/images\/2016\/11\/neil_wallace\/16545826-1-eng-GB\/Neil_Wallace_small.jpg\" width=\"170\" height=\"96\" align=\"left\" hspace=\"8\" \/><\/p>\n<p>\n<i>Neil Wallace, electric propulsion engineer<\/i>\n<\/p>\n<p>\nElectric propulsion has been around for a long time \u20131920s 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 \u2013 and electronics didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.esa.int\/var\/esa\/storage\/images\/esa_multimedia\/images\/2016\/11\/neil_wallace\/16545826-1-eng-GB\/Neil_Wallace_small.jpg\" width=\"170\" height=\"96\" align=\"left\" hspace=\"8\"><\/p>\n<p>\n<i>Neil Wallace, electric propulsion engineer<\/i>\n<\/p>\n<p>\nElectric propulsion has been around for a long time &ndash;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 &ndash; and electronics didn&rsquo;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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":53,"featured_media":615444,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-250251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ESA"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/53"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=250251"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250251\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":250252,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250251\/revisions\/250252"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/615444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=250251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=250251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=250251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}