A new facility will harness plasma to upgrade interplanetary craft

On February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia was carrying seven astronauts back to Earth after they finished work on experiments in microgravity. As the National Aeronautics and Space Administration shuttle began its reentry into Earth’s atmosphere, plasma breached the craft through a hole in its left wing, and Columbia broke into pieces. Everyone aboard died. Conditions for spacecraft reentering Earth’s atmosphere are dangerously intense. Vehicles traveling 5–30 times the speed of sound exert tremendous pressure on the gases surrounding them. Temperatures at a craft’s surface can surpass 10,000 K, nearly twice as hot as the surface of the sun. That’s hot enough to ionize the gases around the craft, forming a potentially destructive plasma. Aerospace engineers’ designs are constrained by the need to keep spacecraft safe from this dangerous, hot form of matter. But since the late 1950s, aerospace engineers and physicists have been trying to figure out whether