About Michael Paluszek

Michael Paluszek is President of Princeton Satellite Systems. He graduated from MIT with a degree in electrical engineering in 1976 and followed that with an Engineer's degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT in 1979. He worked at MIT for a year as a research engineer then worked at Draper Laboratory for 6 years on GN&C for human space missions. He worked at GE Astro Space from 1986 to 1992 on a variety of satellite projects including GPS IIR, Inmarsat 3 and Mars Observer. In 1992 he founded Princeton Satellite Systems.

Submarine Supplier Days 2023

I attended Submarine Supplier Days 2023 in Washington, D.C. March 7 and 8. It is an opportunity for companies contributing to building the latest attack and ballistic missile submarines to get together. The two big programs are for the Columbia Class fleet ballistic missile submarine and the Virginia Class attack submarines. Australia will be buying four of th e latter. I attended the meeting to introduce people to the potential of PFRC as a power plant for future submarines. The first day was a series of presentations on the latest submarines.

On the next day we visited the offices of our N.J. U.S. Representatives and Senators to gain their support for the submarine programs. Here is the inside of the Senate office building with its Calder sculpture.

It was fun to meet people building the submarines. One company in New Jersey has a sole source contract to weld components of the submarines. Each weld is signed by a welder so it can be traced back should a problem arise.

I learned that there are major problems with materials supply and with finding workers to build the submarines. Lead times on some materials can be 80 months. The issues of on-again/off-again production were also discussed. We all agreed, as did the Congressional and Senate staffers, that continuing resolutions were bad.

You can get our submarine brochure here.

Ford Mach-E on the Road

One of the biggest concerns people have with electric vehicles is charging. We’ve taken our Mach-E on two trips with different approaches to charging. Our experience is with a rear-wheel drive Mach-E with the extended range battery. Its EPA range is 303 miles.

The first was from Princeton to the Berkshires, then to Boston and then back to Princeton. The trips were made without any charging on the way. We used Level 2 chargers at our destinations. The Williams Inn, in Williamstown, had ChargePoint chargers, as did the Cambridge Marriott in Kendall Square in Cambridge, MA. At the Cambridge Marriott, there are ChargePoint chargers in the garage used by the valets. The valets are willing to plug your car in as long as you have a ChargePoint card.

The picture blow shows our current mileage.

The most recent trip was from Princeton to Pittsburgh. The one-way distance of 330 miles necessitated charging on the road. We used the Ford app, which showed two stops. We didn’t follow its plan. Instead, we broke the trip into two segments each way with one charging stop. Prior to the trip we tested the high power charging at a local EVGo station.

In both directions we stopped at the Electrify America charging station at 1098 Harrisburg Pike in Carlisle. It was only 2 miles from the highway at a location with the Sheetz convenience store. There were two 350 kW chargers and two 150 kW chargers. Here is the station on the way to Pittsburgh.

It took about 20 minutes to charge from 30% to 80%. We charged until Apple Maps said we had 20% battery margin at our destination. In both directions we ended up with about 15% margin. In Pittsburgh we did destination charging at the Forbes Tower garage. The garage was $22 for 24 hours and charging was free. It was a short walk from the Residence Inn.

On the way to Pittsburgh we were joined at the charging station by two Ford F-150 Lightning trucks. On the way back, we were joined by another Mach-E.

The Electrify America stations were seamless. We have 250 kWh of free charging from Ford. The station knew all about the free charging and we didn’t have to pay or do anything else to be reimbursed. It was simply plug and charge.

PlugShare was the most reliable way to find charging stations.

We drove a Tesla Model 3 as a Hertz rental In Chicago. We charged once at a SuperCharger. It worked very well! I’d say the Electrify America experience was its equal.

PFRC Article in the Journal of Fusion Energy

Our latest paper, The Princeton Field-Reversed Configuration for Compact Nuclear Fusion Power Plants, is available in the Journal of Fusion Energy, Volume 42, Issue 1, June 2023. This paper is the first released in “The emergence of Private Fusion Enterprises” collection. A view-only version is available for free here.

Our paper gives an overview of the Princeton Field-Reversed Configuration (PFRC) fusion reactor concept and includes the status of development, the proposed path toward a reactor, and the commercialization potential of a PFRC reactor.

The Journal of Fusion Energy features papers examining the development of thermonuclear fusion as a useful power source. It serves as a journal of record for publication of research results in the field. This journal provides a forum for discussion of broader policy and planning issues that play a crucial role in energy fusion programs.

Our Visit to ITER in the South of France

On September 22 Marilyn, Eric, and I visited ITER, the International Tokamak Experimental Reactor in Saint-Paul-lez-Durance, France, about 45 minutes from Aix-en-Provence. We took the TGV from Paris to Aix-en-Provence.

Our tour started with a talk by Akko Maas who gave a great presentation on fusion. He talked about building ITER. The complexity of the project and the large international team both present challenges. He also discussed the advantages of fusion in comparison to wind and solar. He noted that while a fusion reactor would have some waste, both wind and solar, when decommissioned, have waste. He talked about the next phase after ITER called DEMO. ITER is designed to produce 500 MW of fusion power from an input of 50 MW heating power. Akko had a slide listing some of the commercial fusion efforts.

Katya Rauhansalo was our tour guide. She had a couple of assistants. They were all really helpful and very knowledgeable. We discussed many fine points of Tokamak design and fusion in general. Marilyn, Eric, and I were combined with a larger group, due to Covid absences. We chatted with members of the other group about PFRC.

A Tokamak is shown below. The green coils are the center stack coils used to induce a current in the plasma. The gray coils are the poloidal coils. The purple coils are the toroidal coils. In ITER, all coils are superconducting. The green donut in the middle of the D coils is the plasma.

The following image shows the Tokamak building.

The first stop was the manufacturing facility for the poloidal coils. The following video shows a crane in operation in the assembly hall.

The top and bottom coils are small enough that they can be shipped complete. The others need to be manufactured. The following figure shows the cryostat for testing the poloidal coils.

This poster gives the details of the testing.

We then moved through the entrance to the Tokamak. We were able to enter the Tokamak building itself. Here is Eric in front of an installed toroidal superconducting coil.

The coil is shaped like a D which works better than a circular coil.

First plasma was scheduled for 2025 but may be delayed. This was partly due to Covid and partly due to the inevitable technical glitches in such a complex project.

Annie Price Presents, “Nuclear Fusion Powered Titan Aircraft” at IAC 2022 in Paris France

Annie Price, who was an intern at Princeton Satellite Systems during the summer of 2021, presented our paper, “Nuclear Fusion Powered Titan Aircraft,” at session C4,10-3.5 which was the Joint Session on Advanced and Nuclear Power and Propulsion Systems.

There were many interesting papers. One was on generating electric power in the magnetic nozzle of a pulsed fusion engine. Another was on the reliability of nuclear thermal engines. The lead-off paper was on a centrifugal nuclear thermal engine with liquid fission fuel.

Annie’s paper covered the design of a Titan aircraft that can both do hypersonic entry and operate at subsonic speeds. Her design uses a 1 MWe nuclear fusion power plant based on PFRC and six electric propeller engines.

She discussed the aerodynamic design, why Titan is so interesting and how the available power would enable new scientific studies of Titan. Annie also described how a PFRC rocket engine or power plant operates. She included a slide on our latest results.

The paper was well received. She had a couple of good questions after her talk and engaged in interesting discussions after the session. Great job Annie!

International Astronautical Congress (IAC) 2022 in Paris, France

IAC 2022 is underway! Annie Price, a former PSS intern, and Mike Paluszek are attending. The Congress has hundreds of technical talks and poster presentations. In addition, there is a huge technology showcase area. Both companies and government organizations have booths. Here are some photos from the show floor.

A 1 N green propellant thruster. It is a few centimeters in length.

The green propellant thruster is from Thalinia Space.

Batteries

Enersys showed its advanced space batteries.

This is a 2-axis sun sensor and a simulator. The sun sensor is the world’s smallest.

Needronix also has a nice transceiver.

The European Space Agency has an enormous booth!

I also met engineers from Boeing, DLR, Teledyne, Lockheed Martin, MDA, Sierra, Rolls-Royce, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Slovakia, Sweden, and many other companies and countries. There were at least three robot arms on display, including one by Kinetik Space.

This one has selectable end-effectors.

I met an engineer who worked on the Apollo program. His area was radiation hardness. He said back then, no one knew much about the problem.

There were excellent talks on Tuesday on formation flying and rendezvous. Annie is presenting our talk on a fusion-powered Titan aircraft on Thursday, in SESSION 10-C3.5, Joint Session on Advanced and Nuclear Power and Propulsion Systems,” In W08 at 13:45.

2022 HiSST Meeting in Bruges, Belgium

I attended the 2022 HiSST meeting, the 2ND INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON HIGH-SPEED VEHICLE SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, in Bruges, Belgium. Bruges is a lovely city and I highly recommend a visit. It is walkable and has many excellent restaurants, museums, breweries, and chocolate shops.

Our session was on Rotating Detonation Engines. Ralf Deiterding (University of Scotland) and Sarah Mecklem (University of Queensland) were the chairs. There were three talks, mine on “Rotational Detonation Engine for Hypersonic Flight”, a talk by Prof. Deiterding of the University Of Southampton on, “Design and testing of a low mass flow RDE running on ethylene-oxygen,” and one by Yue Huang on, “Study on Fuel Injection and Geometry of Plane-radial Rotating Detonation Combustor.”

Prof. Deiterding’s talk showed his team’s impressive experimental work. He had movies of their experiments in operation.

Yue Huang discussed fuel injection into an RDE showing the pros and cons of three different approaches. His team’s work looked at mixing in the combustor instead of pre-mixing.

My talk gave an overview of RDE technology. I discussed research at Princeton University on the stabilization of the RDE flame front. Good results have been obtained with ozone injection and plasma injection. I gave the results of our analysis showing performance advantages over a conventional turboramjet. We use a turbocharger to pressure the RDE at low Mach number.

I discussed applications including hypersonic boost guide passenger airliners and two stage to orbit launch vehicles. An RDE might allow first-stage Mach numbers in excess of Mach 7.

On Thursday the Conference dinner was held. It was a three course dinner at a restaurant on the North Sea. The rain cleared for the event.

The venue was beautiful. A band played throughout the reception and dinner.

It was announced that the 2024 HiSST meeting will be held in Pusan, South Korea.

Nuclear Thermal Propulsion to Mars

For orbital transfers to Mars, a Hohmann transfer is often proposed since it minimizes the fuel consumed. Here is what that looks like.

This was generated by the Spacecraft Control Toolbox function DVHoh.m. 255.2 days is a long time for a crew to be exposed to cosmic radiation. NASA has proposed using a nuclear thermal engine to speed things up. The best combustion engines, like the RL10B-2, use hydrogen and oxygen and have a specific impulse of 465 seconds. This is obtained by running them hydrogen-rich. Nuclear thermal, which is only heating hydrogen, can reach 900 seconds. The higher your specific impulse, the less fuel you use for a given velocity change.

A mission to Mars consists of an Earth escape segment, a heliocentric segment, and Mars entry. You can do them all with the same rocket or use separate stages or methods. For example, you could depart from low-Earth orbit (LEO), do the transfer, and enter low-Mars orbit (LMO) with one stage. As an alternative, the launch vehicle could take the Mars transfer vehicle into a heliocentric orbit. Instead of using the transfer stage to do a powered entry into Mars orbit, you could use aerobraking. Aerobraking could be used, in theory, for both Mars entry and to replace the burn into Mars heliocentric orbit (that is, to match the heliocentric velocity of Mars).

We wrote a MATLAB script in the Spacecraft Control Toolbox to explore some of these concepts. Here are the results:

Specific impulse nuclear thermal 900.00
Specific impulse H2/O2 465.00
Tank Fraction 0.10

Time Hohmann 255.23 days
Time Fast Transfer 150.23 days

Mass fraction Nuclear Thermal Hohmann 0.30
Mass fraction Nuclear Thermal Fast 0.12
Mass fraction H2/O2 Hohmann 0.05
Mass fraction H2/O2 Lambert Only 0.03

Total Delta-V Hohmann 9.03 km/s
Delta-V Hohmann 4.41 km/s

Total Delta-V Fast Transfer 14.35 km/s
Delta-V Fast Transfer Lambert 9.73 km/s
   Departure 4.43 km/s
   Arrival 5.30 km/s
Delta-V Earth Escape 3.19 km/s
Delta-V Mars Entry 1.43 km/s

The Tank Fraction is the fraction of the spacecraft’s dry mass that is proportional to the fuel mass. This is composed mostly of fuel tanks. The mass fraction is how much mass is left when the spacecraft reaches Mars, not including the fuel tanks. The total Delta-V assumes one stage is used to go from LEO to LMO. Lambert’s law is used for the fast transfer. We break up the Lambert maneuver into departure and arrival velocity changes. In principle, you could aerobrake 5.3 km/s + 1.43 km/s.

The fast transfer is shown below. Contrast it with the Hohmann transfer.

Lambert fast transfer.

This was generated using the Spacecraft Control Toolbox function, PlanetTransferLambert.m.

PFRC Fusion Article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

This is a really excellent article on nuclear fusion, “Small-scale fusion tackles energy, space applications,” by M. Mitchell Waldrop, written January 28, 2020, Vol 117, No. 4 for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). The article quotes team Dr. Cohen and Mr. Paluszek and provides an excellent and technically accurate discussion of FRCs, heating methods, and fusion fuel physics.

PNAS has many interesting articles!

The HiSST and IAC Conferences

I’ll be attending two conferences in Europe this September. The first is HiSST, the 2nd International Conference on High-Speed Science and Technology, 11-15 September in Bruges, Belgium. Our paper is “Rotational Detonation Engine for Hypersonic Flight.” My co-authors are
Dr. Christopher Galea, Mr. Miles Simpkins, Dr. Yiguang Ju, and Dr. Mikhail Shneider. The last three authors are from Princeton University. The conference is organized by CEAS, the Council of European Aerospace Societies. We are in session 1a on September 12.

The next conference is the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Paris, France 18-22 September. We are presenting the paper, “Nuclear Fusion Powered Titan Aircraft,” with co-authors Annie Price, Zoe Koniaris, Dr. Christopher Galea, Stephanie Thomas, Dr. Samuel Cohen, and Rachel Stutz. Annie will give the presentation. Dr. Samuel Cohen is the inventor of the reactor discussed in the paper and works at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.

My first overseas conference was IAC in Paris in 1982. I was working at Draper Laboratory at the time.

IAC is also famous from the movie, “2001: A Space Odyssey.” While on Space Station V, Heywood Floyd is asked by Elena, “Well, I hope that you and your wife can come to the I.A.C. conference in June.” To which he replies, “We’re trying to get there. I hope we can.”

After the conference, I’m heading to Aix-en-Provence to visit ITER, where a new experimental Tokamak is under construction. A Tokamak is a toroidal fusion reactor.

Please get in touch with me if you will be at any of the conferences or at ITER!