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Liftoff of a steam-powered, water-mining, interplanetary spacecraft, a new way to explore asteroids and moons that never runs out of rocket fuel during extended missions. This was a super cool project. Thanks @NASA, @kriszacny, and the super engineers at @Honeybee_Ltd.
2/ This spacecraft prototype twisted a coring tube down into the simulated Ceres regolith, heated it to extract water from the hydrated minerals, then heated the water to steam to lift off. This demonstrated how it continuously refills its propellant tanks and hops around Ceres.
3/ At the 6 second point in the video you can see one of the gray coring tubes (with the spiral flutes) before liftoff. This is what twists down into the soil to extract water for rocket fuel. The mission can study the water for science, and it can carry other payloads, too.
4/ It can work anywhere there is water and not too much gravity: carbonaceous asteroids, Europa, Pluto, the poles of Mercury,...
