NASA offers $500,000 in prizes to US companies that build mid-power electric thrusters for spacecraft

NASA is offering $500,000 in prizes to American companies that can build and demonstrate a class of electric thruster that the agency says satellite, defense and exploration missions need. Registration for the Advanced Mid-Power Electric Rocket (AMPERE) Challenge opened on November 9, 2026, and closes on January 27, 2027, according to NASA's announcement.

The challenge asks for prototype Hall-effect thrusters in the mid-power range of 3 to 7 kilowatts. NASA says government and industry stakeholders have identified such systems as critical capabilities. The agency wants the prize to bring electric propulsion to maturity faster and to measure how the prototypes actually perform in its own test facilities, as a basis for future agency and commercial missions.

How a Hall thruster works

Electric propulsion is powered by electricity, in most designs from solar arrays. In a Hall thruster, NASA explains, electrons held in a magnetic field ionize the propellant the spacecraft carries, for example xenon, an inert gas, and the plasma that results streams out as an exhaust plume and pushes the craft forward. The push is small but can be kept up for very long periods. In a 2020 article, NASA cited estimates that electric systems can achieve more than comparable chemical propulsion while using 90% less fuel.

NASA's Psyche asteroid probe is one example. In a 2021 article, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said the probe would be the first spacecraft to use Hall thrusters beyond the Moon's orbit, and that their thrust is about the pressure of three quarters held in the hand. Its thrusters came from Maxar, which JPL said had used solar electric propulsion on commercial communications satellites for decades.

Where mid-power fits

The Hall thruster work NASA described in that 2020 article was at higher power. The agency said its Glenn Research Center and JPL had tested a magnetically shielded 12.5-kilowatt Hall thruster, and that Glenn had contracted Aerojet Rocketdyne to develop a 12.5-kilowatt thruster and was working with it and Maxar on the electric Power and Propulsion Element for the lunar Gateway. AMPERE's 3 to 7 kilowatts sits below that class.

NASA has also pointed to commercial interest. The photo on NASA's announcement shows a Hall thruster under test at Glenn, and its caption names Orbion Space Technology, which NASA says was founded to bring the efficiency of these thrusters to small commercial satellites and sought the center's help to do it. “Now is the most interest I’ve ever seen in using the technology for commercial application,” Dave Jacobson, chief of Glenn's electric propulsion systems branch, said in the 2020 NASA article.

Rules and timeline

NASA's announcement sends entrants to a separate challenge website for registration, the full rules and eligibility. It does not say when each phase ends or when winners will be named.