A spacecraft that 'eats itself', reducing its own mass as it travels, could open up so-called exotic orbits to low-cost space missions, according to its developer.

The idea is all about reducing weight by consuming its own structure during propulsion, freeing up mass that can then be used to either carry more payload or travel further.

"This tank is made out of polymer. It's Nylon 6. These are similar tubes that you can buy from hardware stores, they're sewage pipes," Dr Sam Richards, founder of Meridian Space Command, told Reuters.

By reducing the size of the tank with a simple screw mechanism, the increase in pressure feeds hydrogen peroxide, stored inside the tank, through a superheating process, and into contact with the Nylon 6 tank, which chemically combusts, producing the spacecraft's thrust.

"When you thrust, the length of this tank gets shorter and shorter and shorter until you're left with a little stubby tank. What that means is that you don't have this empty tank left over at the end of your propulsion," Richards said.

"We dubbed this the self-eating spacecraft. It uses this word autophage, which is 'self-eating'. We also call it the Economical Transfer Vehicle (ETV) because it is actually extremely cheap in comparison to much more expensive, maybe more professional solutions," Richards said.

The ETV is designed to be carried into space on commercial ride-sharing rockets, before being launched into accessible low Earth or Sun-Synchronous orbits and then propelling itself into orbits currently out of reach of many start-ups or science programmes.

"If you are a science mission or a university mission or a startup trying to do something for the first time, a developing space agency, for example, all of these missions end up costing too much and they're not able to do it," Richards said.

The propulsion system, developed by Toulouse-based startup and partner on the ETV project, Alpha Impulsion, could not only open up deep space to budget stretched scientists, but also claims to be more sustainable, producing less space debris that ends up in orbit.

Two early customers for the ETV include Space Kidz India, aiming for a lunar orbit and rough-landing attempt, and 'ELFEN', a UK-led science mission to study the effect of Solar Wind on the Earth’s magnetosphere from an orbit far beyond geostationary satellites.

The ETV project is in preliminary design review, backed by UK Space Agency funding

Production: Stuart McDill/Reuters