It's infinitely more practical than VASIMR, which has tremendous minimum energy requirements and fairly poor overall thrust/weight ratios once that is taken into account. VASIMR is only practical if you have hundreds of kilowatts to work with, which means you need a space-based fission reactor, which currently is not in production anywhere in the world at present.
These pulsed plasma thrusters have very much better thrust to weight ratios and scale down much better. They are a comparably small device whereas VASIMR requires large and complex systems of magnets and so forth. It would be easy to run them off of solar power, for example.
If their estimates hold up once they have built their prototype thruster and if they are able to develop it into a commercial enterprise (or license the technology) then NASA would certainly use them given the chance.
These pulsed plasma thrusters have very much better thrust to weight ratios and scale down much better. They are a comparably small device whereas VASIMR requires large and complex systems of magnets and so forth. It would be easy to run them off of solar power, for example.
If their estimates hold up once they have built their prototype thruster and if they are able to develop it into a commercial enterprise (or license the technology) then NASA would certainly use them given the chance.