Ad Astra Rocket Co. is assessing a cooperative unmanned rendezvous mission to a yet-to-be-selected asteroid with a spacecraft and scientific payload powered by the experimental Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (Vasimr), according to Franklin Chang-Diaz, the seven-time space shuttle astronaut who serves as the company’s CEO and president.

Ad Astra’s efforts come against the backdrop of President Barack Obama’s recently announced plans for NASA to begin working toward a manned asteroid rendezvous, circa 2025, that would mark humanity’s first foray beyond the Moon (AW&ST April 19, p. 28).

On Sept. 30, 2009, the company’s VX-200, a two-stage, 200-kw. prototype of the Vasimr, reached full-power plasma thrust under the control of a superconducting magnetin vacuum conditions. The achievement marked a critical milestone in a long-running effort by Chang-Diaz to develop an electric propulsion drive that could one day transport humans to Mars in 39 days.

The VX-200 is a demonstrator for a flight version of the rocket, the VF-200‑1, that Ad Astra now expects to launch to the International Space Station in mid-2014 for further testing, under provisions designating the U.S. segment of the station as a national laboratory. A successful deployment of the VF-200-1 would free Ad Astra to furnish a backup plasma drive, the VF-200-2, for an asteroid mission in partnership with NASA. The Boeing Co. would provide a high-efficiency, lightweight solar power source developed for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Fast Access Spacecraft Test­bed program for a mission launching a year later.

“This is all very new stuff we are discussing,” says Chang-Diaz. “The point is we have not really quite decided what to do with the second engine,” he says. “Once the first engine is up and flying, we are thinking maybe the second engine could be used in another spacecraft, a free-flyer of some sort.”

Ad Astra was incorporated five years ago to advance the development of electric space plasma propulsion started by Chang-Diaz while he was a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and nurtured while he served in NASA’s astronaut corps between 1980 and 2005. Since leaving the space agency, Chang-Diaz has pursued commercial development under a series of Space Act agreements.

Ad Astra’s strategy is to graduate from the municipal power grid as a source of electricity to space solar power demonstrations. The ultimate goal is a 200-megawatt space nuclear reactor as the source of electricity to generate the plasma thrust for fast missions to Mars. The company would develop and lease the plasma rockets for missions that range from satellite-servicing and orbital debris removal to slinging spacecraft on accelerated deep space missions with scientific payloads and human explorers.

A mission to the red planet that is shorter than two months could reduce the health risks to astronauts posed by cosmic and solar radiation as well as the weakened bones and muscles they experience during prolonged weightlessness. Missions to Jupiter would be cut to three years from six.

Political, professional and even public interest in Ad Astra has ballooned in the aftermath of the VX-200’s success, the report in October by the panel led by former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine to assess NASA’s post-shuttle-era strategy and 2011 budget that Obama presented to Congress on Feb. 1. The controversial spending plan cancels NASA’s Constellation back-to-the-Moon program in favor of an extended, multibillion-dollar research and development initiative that would lay the groundwork for a flexible path of exploration to destinations including near-Earth asteroids and comets, Mars and its moons as well as the Earth’s Moon.

Space station operations would be extended from 2016 until at least 2020 as well, and NASA would increase funding for research.