Old News:

[washingtontimes.com]

Washington, DC, Nov. 15 (UPI) — A European Space Agency rocket entered moon orbit Monday in a unique mission using a pioneering power plant. […]

The engine does not combust fuel; rather it splits atoms with electricity to get ions, accelerates them at high speed, and then ejects them, driving the spacecraft forward.

Here’s the hack: my friend/colleague John Melton mentioned ion-propelled engines to me a few years ago, with respect to the ham-radio microsatellites that he helped design.

He said they were really easy to implement: spark plugs.

You mount a spark-plug in a nozzle of some sort. You put it in deep space. You arc across it. Teeny amounts of sparkplug get zapped and released, and Newtonian mechanics does the rest.

Neat, eh? Satellites powered by NGK or Bosch.