{"id":167290,"date":"2025-09-25T03:53:06","date_gmt":"2025-09-25T03:53:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/167290\/"},"modified":"2025-09-25T03:53:06","modified_gmt":"2025-09-25T03:53:06","slug":"its-a-bird-its-a-plane-its-an-air-breathing-satellite","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/167290\/","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s A Bird! It\u2019s A Plane! It\u2019s\u2026 An Air Breathing Satellite?!"},"content":{"rendered":"

The big problem with Low Earth Orbit is, oddly enough, air resistance. Sure, there\u2019s not enough air to breathe in space, but there is enough to create drag when you\u2019re whipping around the planet at 28,000 km\/h (17,000 mph) or more. Over time, that adds up to a decaying orbit. [Eager Space] recently did a video summarizing a paradoxical solution: go even lower, and let the air work for you.<\/a><\/p>\n

So called air-breathing satellites would hang out in very low earth orbit\u2013 still well above the Karman line, but below 300 km (186 miles)\u2013 where atmospheric drag is too dominant for the current \u201ccoast on momentum\u201d satellite paradigm to work. There are advantages to going so low, chiefly for communications (less latency) and earth observation (higher resolutions). You just need to find a way to fight that drag and not crash within a couple of orbits.<\/p>\n

It turns out this space isn\u2019t totally empty (aside from the monoatomic oxygen) as missions have been at very low orbits using conventional, Xenon-fueled ion engines<\/a> to counter drag. The xenon runs out pretty quick in this application, though, and those satellites all had fairly short lifetimes.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s where the air-breathing satellites come in. You don\u2019t need a lot of thrust to stabilize against drag, after all, and the thin whisps of air at 200 km or 300 km above ground level should provide ample reaction mass for some kind of solar-electric ion engine. The devil is in the details, of course, and [Eager Space] spends 13 minutes discussing challenges (like corrosive monoatomic oxygen) and various proposals.<\/p>\n

Whoever is developing these satellites, they could do worse than talk to [Jay Bowles], whose air-breathing ion<\/a> thrusters have been featured here<\/a> several times over the years.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The big problem with Low Earth Orbit is, oddly enough, air resistance. Sure, there\u2019s not enough air to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":167291,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[64,63,128,285],"class_list":{"0":"post-167290","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-space"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=167290"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167290\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/167291"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=167290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=167290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=167290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}