that power requirements on the order of hundreds of kilowatts are required for optimum performance. Current interplanetary spacecraft power systems (such as radioisotope thermoelectric generators and solar arrays) are incapable of producing that much power. NASA's Project Prometheus reactor was expected to generate power in the hundreds of kilowatts range but was discontinued in 2005. A project to produce a space-going nuclear reactor designed to generate 600 kilowatts of electrical power began in 1963 and ran for most of the 1960s in the USSR. It was to power a communication satellite which was in the end not approved. Nuclear reactors supplying kilowatts of electrical power (of the order of ten times more than current RTG power supplies) have been orbited by the USSR: RORSAT; and TOPAZ. Plans to develop a megawatt-scale nuclear reactor for the use aboard a crewed spaceship were announced in 2009 by Russian nuclear Kurchatov Institute, national space agency Roskosmos, and confirmed by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in his November 2009 address to the Federal Assembly. Another plan, proposed by Bradley C. Edwards, is to beam power from the ground. This plan utilizes 5 200 kW free electron lasers at 0.84 micrometres with adaptive optics on the ground to beam power to the MPD-powered spacecraft, where it is converted to electricity by GaAs photovoltaic panels. The tuning of the laser wavelength of 0.840 micrometres ( per photon) and the PV panel bandgap of to each other produces an estimated conversion efficiency of 59% and a predicted power density of up to . This would be sufficient to power a MPD upper stage, perhaps to lift satellites from LEO to GEO. Another problem with MPD technology has been the degradation of cathodes due to evaporation driven by high current densities (in excess of ). The use of lithium and barium propellant mixtures and multi-channel hollow cathodes has been shown in the laboratory to be a promising solution for the cathode erosion problem. Research Research on MPD thrusters has been carried out in the US, the former Soviet Union, Japan, Germany, and Italy. Experimental prototypes were first flown on Soviet spacecraft and, most recently, in 1996, on the Japanese Space Flyer Unit, which demonstrated the successful operation of a quasi-steady pulsed MPD thruster in space. Research at Moscow Aviation Institute, RKK Energiya, National Aerospace University, Kharkiv Aviation Institute, Institute of Space Systems of the University of Stuttgart, ISAS, Centrospazio,