ERC Consolidator Grant · 2022
Building a space Revolution: Electric Air-breathing Technology for High-atmosphere Exploration
Airflight and spaceflight gave mankind different perspectives and opened new paths for communication. A gap remains, between 50 km and 250 km of altitude, where the rarefied atmosphere makes it hardly viable to operate with either spacecraft or planes. Air-breathing Electric Rockets (AERs) will allow to close this gap, lowering the altitude of spacecraft operations below 250 km, in the so-called Very Low Earth Orbits (VLEOs). Operations in VLEOs will give radical advantages in terms of orbit accessibility, payload performance, protection from radiations, and end-of-life disposal. AERs combine an intake to collect the residual atmosphere in front of the spacecraft and an electric thruster to…
From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.