The thruster is no bigger than a large breadbasket. It produces as much thrust as a sheet of paper resting on your hand, but that's enough for the positively charged xenon ions to accelerate DS1 to 70,000 mph. He teaches propulsion to more than 100 undergraduate and graduate aero students and directs a lab composed of nine PhD students and three undergraduates. It's almost like a person is born wanting to do propulsion. Other engineering fields aren't necessarily that way.
Many people evolve into chemical, electrical or other engineers after years of studying.
The partnership between fiction and science continues today, he says, when novelists and scientists are talking about whether humans can figure out how to travel faster than light. Of course the 'engineering' problem we face now, of even getting close to the speed of light, may not be solved for another 100 years at least. We can only go one-ten thousandth of that speed now. But to go faster means changing the current limits we see on energy and matter relationships. Even if we could go at light speed it would take four years one-way to get to the nearest star.