Comment by m_mueller
8 years ago
ISS is at 150km and needs costly refueling, right? Wouldn’t that be the most interesting applicaton in terms of cost savings?
8 years ago
ISS is at 150km and needs costly refueling, right? Wouldn’t that be the most interesting applicaton in terms of cost savings?
ISS is at 400+ km altitude where the atmosphere is really thin. It's also very heavy for low thrust electric propulsion.
Electric thrusters have a low thrust to weight ratio but there's nothing stopping you, in theory, from just scaling up. The ISS only experiences a little drag so an electric drive trying to zero that out doesn't need a huge thrust. There's some interest in adapting VASIMR for ISS station keeping. It would work, in theory, to just put a large number of Hall effect thrusters on the back but the piping would be infeasible.
It also needs resupply missions for food, air, and crew anyway. Reboost is almost a footnote.