In the endless pursuit of faster, more efficient travel, engineers have been cooking up all kinds of new forms of propulsion. One of the most interesting to emerge in the last decade is the electric ...

In the relentless quest to make journeys to Mars shorter and safer, Russian scientists have recently turned heads with a bold claim: A plasma-based propulsion system could cut the Earth–Mars transit ...

The big picture: In deep-space travel, the race is no longer about who has the biggest rocket – it's about who can build the smartest plasma engine. As the competition to reach Mars intensifies, ...