Univity tested its first payload on the rooftop of a CNES facility in France as part of early 5G satellite experiments. Credit: ©CNES/Adrien RIBET, 2025 TAMPA, Fla. — France-based propulsion startup ...

You don’t see many ionic thrusters out in the world these days. The high-voltage devices are interesting pieces of technology, but they aren’t all that relevant to our normal lives. They’re gradually ...

Demand for electric propulsion is growing for space applications and the proposed technological solutions are evolving fast. Gridded Ion Technology allows a more efficient management of Xe, providing ...

Sending an object to another star is still the stuff of science fiction. But some concrete missions could get us at least part way there. These "interstellar precursor missions" include a trip to the ...

Pale Blue plans to demonstrate its 1U water ion thruster twice in 2025 on D-Orbit’s Ion Satellite Carrier, an orbital transfer vehicle. The contract with D-Orbit includes two launch opportunities and ...

NASA has successfully tested a lithium-fed magnetoplasmadynamic thruster reaching 120 kilowatts, 25 times more powerful than its current top ion engine. The breakthrough could drastically cut ...

Aerojet, a GenCorp (NYSE: GY – News) company, and NEC Corporation (TSE: 6701 – News) announced today that the companies will explore the feasibility of jointly supplying low power ion propulsion ...

On February 24, 2026, inside a specialized vacuum chamber at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, engineers fed lithium metal vapor into a magnetoplasmadynamic thruster and pushed it ...

Proving yet again that Star Trek was scarily prescient, NASA has announced that its NEXT ion drive -- NASA's Evolutionary Xenon Thruster -- has operated continually for over 43,000 hours (five years).