Magdrive

Magdrive's thrusters run on solid metal. A bank of supercapacitors charges off the spacecraft's solar power and dumps at least ten kilojoules at over a thousand volts into a copper or aluminium target, vaporising and ionising it into a dense plasma that magnetic fields then accelerate. The flight unit, Rogue, weighs under three kilograms, fits a CubeSat, and draws anywhere from half a watt to 150. Most of that mass is not the thruster; it is the energy storage and the electronics that deliver the pulse.

Solid propellant removes a lot of apparatus: no xenon supply chain, no high-pressure tank, no regulator, no plumbing. Mark Stokes and Thomas Clayson came out of Imperial College from pulsed power rather than conventional electric propulsion, and the machine reflects that lineage, being a pulsed-power device before it is a thruster. The case for pulses over the steady low thrust of a Hall unit is that collision avoidance and defence manoeuvre want thrust on demand rather than thrust eventually.

What flew in June 2025 was Rogue, riding a D-Orbit tug, and it worked as an electrical system. Across the mission it charged and discharged over the full half-watt to 150-watt range and produced plasma end to end. What it never did was move the spacecraft it was attached to, so there is still no measurement from orbit of thrust, specific impulse or total impulse, and all performance figures remain ground data and modelling. No specific impulse number has been published at all, and the company's descriptions have compared the system both to electric propulsion and to chemical, which cannot both be right. Ablating metal at a thousand volts also sprays conductive material, an erosion and contamination problem that pulsed plasma thrusters have historically struggled with, and no on-orbit lifetime data exists.