BREATHE

BREATHE is an ERC project aiming to fill with air-breathing electric rocketst the gap that remains, between 50 km and 250 km of altitude, where the rarefied atmosphere makes it hardly viable to operate with either spacecraft or planes.

BREATHE – Building a space Revolution: Electric Air-breathing Technology for High-atmosphere Exploration
Airflight and spaceflight gave mankind different perspectives and opened new paths for communication. A gap remains, between 50 km and 250 km of altitude, where the rarefied atmosphere makes it hardly viable to operate with either spacecraft or planes. Air-breathing Electric Rockets (AERs) can allow to lower the altitude of spacecraft operations below 250 km, in Very Low Earth Orbits (VLEOs). Operations in VLEOs will give radical advantages in terms of payload performance, protection from radiations, and debris mitigation. AERs combine an intake to collect the residual atmosphere in front of the spacecraft and an electric thruster to ionize and accelerate the atmospheric particles. Several AER realizations have been proposed, but the few end-to-end tests highlighted the need to improve the AER design and the representativeness of simulated atmospheric flows. The difficulty in recreating the VLEO environment on ground limits the data available to validate modelling efforts. The BREATHE project will focus on the development of models and simulations for atmospheric flows and low-temperature plasmas, the realization of a controlled environment for on ground testing, and the characterization of technological solutions for an AER-based CubeSat platform. The project objective is to increase the understanding of air-breathing electric propulsion and to pave the way toward the in-orbit demonstration of the AER concept.

Tommaso Andreussi is Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the Mechanical Intelligence Institute of the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies.

Tommaso Andreussi is Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the Mechanical Intelligence Institute of the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies. He defended his PhD at Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa in 2008 and, in the following years, he focused on the theoretical modelling and experimental investigation of plasma thrusters for space applications. From 2010 to 2022, he worked as senior researcher at Alta S.p.A. and then as technical manager at SITAEL S.p.A., where he was responsible for R&D activities and qualification of electric propulsion systems, with a specific focus on high-power Hall thrusters, air-breathing electric propulsion, and plasma diagnostics.