Despite being part of the New Millennium project, the actual project began in 1995. It took about three years to get the space craft from blueprint to the actual launch. The official date for the launch was October 24, 1998 from Cape Canaveral [6].
Ion Propulsion Engine .
Arguably the most important technology being tested on the Deep Space 1 space craft was the ion propulsion engine. Although the technology was considered to be innovative, the idea of the electrically powered rocket was first brought up around fifty years ago, at the time of the V2 rocket by a German born rocket scientist, Wernher von Braun [5]. He came over to the U.S. after the Second World War to lead the rocket program over here and he envisioned a rocket that was powered by electricity instead of the conventional rockets that are propelled by super-heated gas. The ion engine excited scientists because if it could work, a great deal of gas could be saved since the ion engine is more fuel efficient then the chemical rockets. .
The ion powered engine gets its propulsion from a chemical reaction instead of burning the gas. The ion engine requires an electric current to be run through the propellant. The ions are then accelerated with an electric voltage which gives them a positive charge and in turn pushes the ions out quickly which propels the craft at a very high speed [5]. Of course the scientists have to force out the ions downward in order to get upward lift. A few prototypes were tested many years ago but were not very successful. This made some scientists working on the project very apprehensive because the whole outcome of the mission depended on the ion propulsion engine to work properly. Because of this, they ran all kinds of tests on the engines to no limit and made sure that Deep Space 1 was ready to be put in outer space. No other space craft equipped with an ion propelled engine had ever gone to deep space before.