Axial Temperature Behavior of a Heat Exchanger Tube for Microwave Thermal Rockets

MICROWAVE thermal rockets bypass the chemical propulsion performance limitation by using an external energy source and an onboard heat exchanger (see Fig. 1). The first detailed concept for beamed energy propulsion used ground-based lasers and was proposed by Kantrowitz in 1972 [1]. Many variants of laser propulsion exist, with the laser heat exchanger design proposed by Kare [2] being the most similar to the microwave thermal rocket.