Re: Prices on Ion Drives or Hall Thrusters?

[Vincent Cate]

Heinrich Zinndorf-Linker > wrote in message >...
> OK, buy them in Germany, instead. The Germans will be glad to offer
> you a hundred of them out of their catalogue, as you need them. Just
> take a look "over the curtain"...

I found some ion drives from Daimler Chrysler Aerospace at:
http://dutlsisa.lr.tudelft.nl/Propulsion/Data/Rocket_motor_data.htm#Ion_thruster

but these are much lower thrust than the 1.5 Newton Russian thruster,
just 0.025 N for the large one.

Aerojet in the USA also makes ion drives and hall thrusters, see:
http://www.rocket.com/epandse.html

Not sure of their thrust, but I suspect it is small.
Even the Boeing (was Hughes) 702 ion drive is only 0.165 Newtons:
http://www.boeing.com/defense-space/space/bss/factsheets/xips/xips.html

The Busek BHT-HD-8000 has about 0.5 Newton at 8 kw, see:
http://www.busek.com/bht.htm

So the Busek is interesting, but currently, for large thrust at
high ISP, the Russian SPT-290 is my favorite. Anyone know of any
other high ISP thrusters with over 1 Newton thrust?

I also suspect Russian prices are lower, and that I won't have the
export control problems that can come with buying from a US company.

-- Vince

[Vincent Cate]

(John Schilling) wrote in message >...
> You won't get one for less than a hundred thousand, and you get
> a scarlet 'S' for "Sucker!" if you pay more than ten million,
> but anything in between is possible.
>
>
> >Better yet, if I wanted 200 of them, what do you think they would
> >cost?
>
> An order of that size gets you a factor of two to four in cost
> reductions, which you ought to be able to negoitate as price
> reductions.

Thanks for the info.

>From talking to one sales/engineer it seemed that most of their cost
was in testing and "space rating". The level of quality control
required to get the reliability most customers want costs a lot. If
I was willing to accept a higher failure rate it seemed like they would
take a factor of 2 or 3 off the price.

-- Vince

[Vincent Cate]

I just talked to someone at Aerojet and they gave me some info
interesting enough that I thought I would post it.

For the ISP range that I am interested in, like 1,500 to 2,500
a Hall Thruster is the way to go. For lower ISP like 500 to 1,000
an arjet would be good. For higher ISP, maybe 2,500 to 10,000+
an Ion Drive would be the way to go.

They have a 4.5 kw Hall thruster that is 20 cm in diameter,
produces 285 mN thrust, and weighs 12 Kg.

A Hall Thruster is a circle where the thickness does not change
much with the power level. However, the area scales linearly
with the power level. Also, the thrust scales linearly with
the power level, though efficiency goes up a bit at higher power.

They have built a 50 kw Hall Thruster for NASA. A system
with this thruster might be like $1.5 to $2 mil. Most of the
cost is actually in the electronics for power conditioning and
control. There is nothing fundamentally keeping them from
building larger ones, though there would be some R&D cost to
do so.

Ion drives have more complicated electronics and higher voltages.
For the same power level (not thrust since higher ISP) they
probably cost 25% to 40% more.

They have not had trouble getting export licenses but it takes like
6 month to get them.

I asked how much cheaper the thruster would be if I totally relaxed
the reliability requirements and ordered 200 of them. The answer
was maybe 1/4 the price.

----- now on to my comments ----

Scaling from the 4.5 kw unit, the 50 kw unit must be a bit over
3 N of thrust. This is the largest commercial Hall Thruster I know of.

My gut instinct is that there could be more than a factor
of 4 reduction for the due to relaxed requirements and volume.
I forgot to mention that I would relax the weight requirements,
be happy with non space-rated electronics, etc.

Since most of the cost is electronics, and electronics tend to get
cheaper fast, the cost of these thrusters should be dropping over time.

-- Vince

[John Schilling]

Heinrich Zinndorf-Linker > writes:

>Am 9 Jul 2003 14:03:52 -0700 schrieb "John Schilling":

>>>How do prices on Ion Drives compare to prices for Hall Thrusters?

>>There are no prices on ion thrusters; they are not commercially
>>available at any price.

>>The only US manufacturer of ion thrusters is Boeing Space Systems,
>>which will not sell them. They will, if you like, build and sell
>>you an entire spacecraft with ion thrusters, but you'll pay the
>>usual Boeing rate for the entire spacecraft.

>OK, buy them in Germany, instead. The Germans will be glad to offer
>you a hundred of them out of their catalogue, as you need them.

The Germans don't have a catalogue. They have a prototype thruster,
flown once, and some lab hardware and viewgraphs regarding larger
models to come. Commercial production and marketing are still in
the future, and they may not be glad to have you offer on their
behalf thrusters they aren't ready to make, thrusters they have
already promised to someone else, etc.

I strongly suspect that we will see German ion thrusters on commercial
spacecraft at some point. But that does not necessarily imply catalog
sales to whoever wants them; they might just as well make an exclusive
deal with a particular bus manufacturer.

You want anything approaching consistent free-market capitalist behavior
in this industry, you have to go a bit farther east than Germany.


--
*John Schilling * "Anything worth doing, *
*Member:AIAA,NRA,ACLU,SAS,LP * is worth doing for money" *
*Chief Scientist & General Partner * -13th Rule of Acquisition *
*White Elephant Research, LLC * "There is no substitute *
* for success" *
*661-951-9107 or 661-275-6795 * -58th Rule of Acquisition *