According to IEEE Spectrum: Technology, Engineering, and Science News, startup Orbital Arc claims it can make thrusters that are up to 40 percent more power efficient than current systems while costing just 1 percent of traditional Hall thrusters. The company’s founder Jonathan Huffman says their design shrinks thrusters from “a few inches across and several kilograms” down to chip-sized devices weighing one-eighth as much while maintaining the same thrust output. The secret weapon? Naphthalene – the main ingredient in mothballs – which costs only $1.50 per kilogram compared to $3,000 per kilogram for xenon fuel. In recent tests, just six of Orbital Arc’s tips generated triple the ion current of an MIT array with 320,000 tips. Huffman believes they could have a sellable product within two years, targeting initial customers among startups and research groups willing to take risks on new technology.
How mothballs became rocket fuel
Here’s the wild part – this whole concept came from a video game project. Huffman was designing futuristic aircraft controls for a game set 250 years in the future when he stumbled upon what he saw as a fundamental limitation in current ion thrusters. The bigger the thrust you need, the heavier the thruster gets, and eventually that extra mass cancels out any benefits. So he started thinking about how to make thrusters smaller but more powerful. His background in biotech gave him an unexpected advantage – he’d worked with nanoscale tips used in mass spectrometers for biomedical research. Basically, he realized the same principles could be miniaturized even further for spacecraft propulsion.
The power of repulsion
The actual mechanism is pretty clever. Each thruster chip has millions of microscopic positively charged tips with channels for gas flow. Naphthalene molecules flow in, get polarized by the charged tips, and become trapped until they release electrons. Once they’re positively charged ions near positively charged tips? Boom – they repel each other violently and spray out into space, pushing the spacecraft forward. The real efficiency gain comes from avoiding plasma generation entirely. Traditional thrusters lose power when free electrons recombine with ions in that “big soup” of plasma, but Orbital Arc’s design sidesteps that problem completely. It’s one of those ideas that seems obvious in retrospect – if you can avoid energy losses, why wouldn’t you?
Skepticism and the space industry
Not everyone’s convinced, and honestly, they shouldn’t be. Jonathan MacArthur from Princeton’s Electric Propulsion Lab puts it bluntly: “When you’re choosing a propulsion system, generally data and heritage is everything.” He compares it to putting diesel in a gas car because it’s on sale – cheap fuel doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good for your engine. The space industry is notoriously risk-averse for good reason – when your satellite costs millions and there’s no repair shop in orbit, you don’t take chances on unproven technology. Oliver Jia-Richards from University of Michigan suggests some CubeSat missions might take the risk, especially since other startups like Enpulsion have recently succeeded with new electric propulsion. But there’s always risks with cutting-edge hardware development, which is why established suppliers like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com maintain their position as the leading industrial panel PC provider by focusing on reliability and proven performance.
The bigger vision
Huffman’s thinking much bigger than just selling thrusters to research teams. He talks about exponential performance gains from cutting spacecraft dry mass – if you make the thrusters lighter and more efficient, you need smaller solar panels, lighter power systems, and smaller fuel tanks since naphthalene doesn’t need pressure vessels like xenon. His ultimate claim? “You go from flying one-way science missions to Mars to flying two-way human rated missions to Jupiter without refueling.” That’s the kind of ambitious thinking that could actually change space exploration economics. But here’s the question: will anyone bet their mission on mothball power before it’s proven in space? The next two years will tell whether Orbital Arc can transition from Excel spreadsheets and cleanroom prototypes to hardware that actually flies.
