Earlier this week, SpaceX released more information about the new Argon Hall thrusters that power the Starlink V2 mini-satellites.
The deal, which closed in July 2021, was a very rare move for SpaceX. Swarm, which manufactures and operates microsatellites for IoT devices, is the company’s only acquisition in his 21-year history. It’s also worth noting that Swarm was still a very young company, relatively speaking. When the deal was closed, the startup had about 30 employees, had 120 sandwich-sized satellites in orbit, and had just gone live with its flagship product earlier that year. .
But talent is king in the space industry, and SpaceX appears to have benefited greatly from absorbing Swarm’s team.
Swarm’s two co-founders, Sara Spangelo and Benjamin Longmier, have been appointed Senior Director of Satellite Engineering at SpaceX. Both are part of Starlink’s direct-to-sell team. The team aims to leverage the Starlink constellation to bring satellite connectivity to smartphones around the world. But Longmier says on his LinkedIn that he will lead Starlink’s electric propulsion group, the group responsible for engineering the new argon hole thrusters unveiled this week.
Hall thrusters themselves are nothing new. The name refers to a common propulsion technology that is decades old. Basically, a Hall thruster uses a magnetic field to ionize a propellant and create a plasma. Satellites use thrusters throughout their lifetime. This is to adjust its attitude, avoid collisions with other objects, and deorbit at the end of its life.
The real innovation lies in the propellant, argon. Argon is many times cheaper than Xenon (the most common and expensive propellant used in Hall thrusters) and Krypton (SpaceX, the propellant used in Starlink V1 and V1.5 satellites).
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said on Twitter: “The move to argon was tricky, but necessary because krypton is too rare.” According to specifications shared online, these new thrusters deliver 2.4 times more thrust and 1.5 times more specific impulse than the previous Starlink thruster (how efficiently the unit uses propellant relative to the thrust produced). scale) to use.
In 2011, Longmier was the lead author of a technical paper on an electric propulsion system using argon gas. He also co-authored another paper on thrusters using argon and xenon as propellants. Longmier said on his Twitter that it would take him 556 days after the thruster had a clean sheet to get back on track. This means SpaceX began work on thrust shortly after Swarm was acquired by him around the end of August 2021. Longmier did not respond to his TechCrunch request for comment.
