Applied Ion Systems LLC

Applied Ion Systems is one engineer, Michael Bretti, designing, building and vacuum-testing miniature electric thrusters at home, and publishing everything: the designs, the test data, the failures. The thrusters, pulsed plasma, vacuum arc and warm gas units fueled by adamantane, are sized for PocketQubes and cubesats, the smallest satellites, whose builders could never afford propulsion at aerospace prices. It is an LLC in name and a hobbyist-budget research program in practice.

The bet is that publishing the whole development process, rather than guarding it, is what finally makes propulsion cheap enough for the smallest teams. There is real flight history behind it: an AIS thruster first reached orbit in March 2021 on a Rocket Lab launch, and NASA's survey of small-spacecraft technology cited his vacuum arc and adamantane thrusters in 2023.

Everything rests on one person's spare time. Performance claims are self-published, and the public trail thins after 2023, when the adamantane work appeared at a plasma physics conference. Whether the program is moving today is hard to tell from outside; nothing announces a stop, and nothing recent announces progress either.