Day: May 10, 2019

WASHINGTON — Satellite electric propulsion startup Apollo Fusion is expanding its product line through an agreement with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, giving it access to advanced Hall thruster technology.

The Silicon Valley-based company said May 7 that it signed a deal that gives it an exclusive worldwide commercial license for JPL’s Magnetically Shielded Miniature, or MaSMi, Hall thruster technology, as well as a contract to provide JPL with three thrusters that use that technology.

Apollo Fusion plans to use the MaSMi technology in an electric thruster called the Apollo Xenon Engine (AXE), which will provide higher performance than the existing electric thrusters that the company has been developing.

Related: Air-Breathing Thruster Paves Way for Never-Ending Space Missions at Earth and Mars

Mike Cassidy, chief executive of Apollo Fusion, said in an interview that a key benefit of MaSMi is its use of magnetic shielding to protect components from the plasma generated by the thruster. “It uses magnetic field lines to stop the plasma inside a Hall thruster from eroding the inside of the thruster,” he said.

That erosion limits the lifetime of a conventional Hall thruster to about 200,000 newton-seconds of impulse. Magnetic shielding allows the thruster to last far longer: Cassidy estimated its impulse will be up to 10 times higher.

Apollo Fusion plans to take that technology and commercialize it, including “design to manufacturability” changes that reduces the use of exotic materials and long-lead-time components. That reflects the difference in demand the company anticipates. “Many of the JPL missions might be building one or two probes, whereas for some of our customers it may be hundreds of satellites,” he said.

The company will deliver the three thrusters to JPL to summer, primarily for ground testing, although Cassidy said one of the thrusters could be used on a future spacecraft. He said the company will start commercial production of the AXE thrusters in early 2020.

AXE will offer higher thrust and performance over the company’s existing Apollo Constellation Engine (ACE), with 1000 watts of power and 55 millinewtons of thrust, versus 400 watts and 24 millinewtons of thrust for ACE. However, Cassidy said the two thrusters will be complementary.

“There’s strong interest in both the 400-watt and kilowatt-level thrusters,” he said. AXE, he said, will likely be of interest for those developing high-power satellites, including all-electric GEO satellites that want the higher performance to decrease the transit time to their final geostationary orbit. A single AXE thruster, he said, is lighter than two or three smaller ACE thrusters.

Apollo Fusion still sees interest for ACE from companies developing smaller low Earth orbit satellites. That thruster has yet to fly in space, but Cassidy said one will fly in the second half of the year on a cubesat mission designed specifically to test it.

Cassidy added that the JPL deal has an additional benefit for the company. “We’ve really gotten a great response from a lot of our commercial customers,” he said. “They’ve said, ‘Wow, JPL picked you guys to do this. That’s impressive.'”

This story was provided by SpaceNews, dedicated to covering all aspects of the space industry.  

Sony’s latest promotional video for future PlayStation games (dubbed “State of Play”) concluded with a surprise peek at a long-awaited game: Final Fantasy VII Remake. In bad news, the Thursday trailer was clearly limited by publisher Square Enix’s intent to save a bigger reveal for “June,” possibly timed for the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo.

But in good news, the project, announced nearly four years ago, finally looks like an honest-to-goodness video game. At last, we can begin guessing what its final version might possibly look and play like.

The most apparent thing from the trailer, embedded below, is an active battle system that looks largely similar to that found in Final Fantasy XV and the wider Kingdom Hearts series. (We got a tease of this in a late-2015 trailer.) A low-angled camera sits behind whichever character is being controlled, and each fighter gets two immediate action buttons, along with a shortcut to a larger menu. (That menu wasn’t toggled in today’s one-minute video.)

Additionally, the high level of detail given to familiar characters like Cloud, Aerith, and Barrett seems to be maintained outside of cinematic, conversational sequences, as made evident by a few freeze-frame moments when the characters have a slight reduction in detail and increase in fuzziness. If this is indeed how the in-game, real-time rendering turns out, we’re in for one heck of a production, at least on a visual scale. But major characters like Sephiroth only get the briefest of teases, while others (particularly Tifa) do not appear to be visible.

No, there’s no release date yet attached to this game, which is still slated to be a PlayStation console exclusive whenever it comes out. And Square Enix has yet to clarify its plans for an “episodic” FFVII Remake release schedule, as was originally teased in 2015.

Listing image by Square Enix

Volkswagen

opened up pre-booking for the upcoming

ID.3 electric hatchback

on Wednesday. In the following 24 hours, it received more than 10,000 preorders.

The booking includes a registration for an early production slot for the launch edition ID.3 “1st” model, which has a WLTP range of 420 km, or 260 miles. Only 30,000 launch edition models will be built, and production is scheduled to start in late 2019. The car itself will be fully revealed at the Frankfurt IAA motor show in the fall, and the first customer cars will be delivered a little more than a year from now, in mid-2020.

Volkswagen says some 200 pre-production ID.3 vehicles have been built, and the main facility for

electric car

production will be its plant in Zwickau, Germany, which will make only MEB platform

electric vehicles

. Yearly production capacity is projected to be 330,000 vehicles, from 2020 on.

An interesting footnote in history is that Zwickau used to house the manufacturing plant for the legendary, partially composite

East German Trabant car,

one of the most modest vehicles ever built. At the other end of the scale in the same German state of Sachsen is Dresden’s Gläserne Manufaktur plant, which used to build the luxurious

Phaeton

sedan, and which will also produce MEB platform electric cars in the future. After the Phaeton’s demise, the ostentatious, wood-floored facility was re-tooled to build the

e-Golf

.