
It sounds like a NASA pipe dream: a new spacecraft thruster that’s up to 40 percent more power efficient than today’s. Even better, its fuel costs less than a thousandth as much and weighs an eighth of the mass. A startup called Orbital Arc claims it can make such a thruster.
With this design, “we can go from a thruster that’s about a few inches across and several kilograms to a thruster on a chip that’s about an inch across and has the same thrust output, but weighs about an eighth as much,”…








