As revealed by Flight back in August NASA will help its former astronaut Franklin Chang-Díaz “flight” test his engine, the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMIR), on the International Space Station following a space act agreement deal
Announced by Chang-Díaz’s company, Ad Astra Rocket, on Saturday 13 December the VASIMIR developer will have to achieven agreed milestones to meet certain “gates” (who comes up with this terminology?) before any decision is made to send the engine to ISS
Although the COTS rockets have been identified as one possible way of getting VASIMIR to the station, Hyperbola’s speculation is that there is probably enough room in the orbiter payload bay for STS-134, when the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer experiment is taken up. The AMS takes up about a third of the payload bay from the CGI images I’ve seen
