Old News (Score -1, Flamebait)

These ideas have been floating around NASA and the defense industry for years. They have also been demonstrated at Sandia. So why haven't these engines been put into use? As someone said, they provide very little acceleartion thus they'd only be able to get a ship to the moon by creating an increasingly eccentric orbit around the earth then eventually transferring to a very eccentric moon orbit and normalizing. Such a process would take a month at least and more realistically 3-6. As a result the only projects suggested were either unmanned deep space probes or like one that I briefly worked on with JPL called SmallTug to create the technology that could eventually create a supply chain for a moon base. Most of these projects have been put on hold for the Crew Excursion Vehicle.

So while the ESA is desperately trying to generate some positive press to help people forget about their recent failings the good old US of A is putting proven and effective technology into getting back to the moon. What I will be interested in seeing is a dual propulsion system that uses conventional propulsion to gain a large initial delta v and then use a constant ion thrust to gradually increase it for longer manned missions (can someone say Mars?)