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. Air-breathing Electric Rockets (AERs) will allow to close this gap, lowering the altitude of spacecraft in the Very Low Earth Orbits (VLEOs). Operations in VLEOs will give radical advantages in terms of payload performance, protection from radiations, and end-of-life disposal.
AERs combine an intake to collect the residual atmosphere and an electric thruster to ionize and accelerate the atmospheric particles. Such residual gas can be exploited as renewable resource to keep the spacecraft on a VLEO, while removing the main limiting factor of spacecraft lifetime, i.e., the amount of stored propellant. Several realizations of the AER concept have been proposed, but limited evidence of the concept feasibility is available. The difficulty in recreating the VLEO environment in a laboratory limits the data available to validate scaling laws and modelling efforts.

The objective of BREATHE is to pave the way toward the in-orbit demonstration of the AER concept. Project activities will focus on:

1. Developing models and simulation tools to characterize atmospheric flows and plasmas;
2. Providing a controlled environment for the characterization of prototypes;
3. Identifying the main scaling laws governing AERs and, thus, the optimal operating principle and design

Visit the project page on the European portal

Credit images: Riva Illustrations