How an Australian University Student Beat NASA at Its Own Game

Paddy Neumann kind of looks like someone who's really into brewing beer. But back when he was a third year student at the University of Sydney, the now Dr Neumann started on a course of experimentation that would see him beat innovations by NASA's top scientists.

For his final research project, Paddy was working with the university's plasma discharge, mapping the electric and magnetic charges around it. He noticed the particles moving through the machine were going really fast. In fact, they were clocking in at around 23 kilometres per second.

"I looked at my numbers from that final year project and thought, you could probably make a rocket out of this," he says. Particularly when you consider that conventional hydrogen-oxygen rockets only get around 4.5 kilometres per second.

Through his Honours, Masters, and PhD, Paddy refined his idea, eventually arriving at the Neumann Drive, which is a world record-breaking ion engine. Right now, the drive can achieve more than 11,000 seconds of specific impulse—which is one measure of how efficient a rocket engine is. The higher the number, the better. Paddy says that by comparison, NASA's best experimental efforts max out at 9,600 seconds of specific impulse.