by Paul Gilster | Sep 21, 2012 | Missions |
One of the challenges of explaining why a starship project is worth doing even though its final goal may not be realized for a long time is in showing how this work can have an impact on improving things on Earth. Technological spinoffs have acquired a bad name because of the stigma of Teflon and Tang — NASA hasn’t made the strongest case for how advanced work changes lives (and in any case, Teflon and Tang are not actually NASA spinoffs, though they are in the eyes of the public). But work in space can effect profound changes on Earth, and there is every reason to believe that energy breakthroughs in propulsion and power generation could be highly useful in solving our planet’s future energy demands. [See the comments for a recent change to this text].
The list can obviously be expanded, as in the case of closed ecologies, which we’ve been talking about recently in these pages. A long-duration human mission demands attention to environments and their maintenance that will surely tell us much about preserving Earth’s ecosystems. Now I see that Rachel Armstrong, who works on sustainable environmental solutions using synthetic biology, is developing Project Persephone, an Icarus Interstellar initiative for the 100 Year Starship effort that looks at starship architecture and how it can best protect its inhabitants.
Armstrong is a TED Fellow whose work is multidisciplinary to the core. Indeed, it’s her view that “Scientists need to work outside their own areas of expertise to make new technologies that are pertinent to the 21st century and to collaborate, both with other scientific disciplines and the arts and humanities.” Synthetic biology can be considered the engineering of living systems. In an article for Discovery News, Armstrong explains that a ‘worldship’ — a vast craft that might take centuries or more to carry a human population to the stars — will need to behave as a supple and evolving ecology rather than as the kind of mechanistic system found in modern cities today.
Image: A worldship conceived as a vast cylinder, housing a self-contained ecology that may have to survive for centuries if not longer. A new project examines synthetic biology and sustainable architectures for such an effort. Credit: Adrian Mann.
That means thinking creatively about what the kind of materials we build with and what we ask them to do. Inert materials and industrial methods are what we are familiar with, but it’s Armstrong’s view that these practices create barriers rather than connections:
Perhaps it is possible to use the innate “force” of different kinds of materials to create an artificial nature, which can shape streams of material flow to create a living interior that is capable of regeneration and is not simply waiting to be consumed by its human colony. A material ecology may be feasible if the worldship itself was able to provide an external source of energy, so that the living interior would not be a closed system, but open — as if it had its own (nuclear) sun.
Just as metamaterials hold out the prospect of cheaper and lighter manufacture of large objects like telescope mirrors, synthetic biology may help us work with and adjust the numerous interactions that make up the support structure for a functioning community. Armstrong points to possibilities like using artificial soils and terrestrial micro-biota to seed a worldship’s ecology. Project Persephone will develop technical models that explore such systems and the infrastructures to support them.
Out of this, of course, may well come commercial products that can show us how to make our cities more livable. An ‘ecological architecture’ is one designed to “integrate our megacities with natural ecologies and strive for a new kind of ‘sustainability’ where, through the design of buildings, our civilization can return useful substances back to the environment, as well as consume them.”
Thus the end of the old industrial paradigm in favor of a complex, ecological approach to architecture and community design. A long-haul starship is the perfect experimental vehicle in which to model these concepts, for it’s a closed system that demands we apply the lessons we’ve learned from our own ecology in creating a sustainable living space for generations of crew. The growing interest in these matters is a demonstration of how many issues we’ve overlooked in favor of concentrating on the propulsion dilemma. Yet experiments in closed ecologies and synthetic biology can proceed in the near-term, with a technological spinoff that could quickly demonstrate the value of long-term approaches to basic human needs.
As for the name, Persephone was not only a goddess of the underworld but the goddess of spring growth, worshipped in the ancient world in the initiation ceremonies known as the Eleusinian Mysteries. The cult of Demeter (mother of Persephone) seems to have been in place in Mycenaean Greece if not before, offering its initiates passage to an paradisiacal afterlife. According to the legend, the abduction of Persephone by Hades prompted Demeter to search for her, setting up a reunion that marked the rebirth of plant life and the end of drought. Wrapped up in the Eleusinian mysteries, then, is the secret of the seasons, death and regeneration.
When I think about a starship whose living systems have grown critically out of balance, I think of Brian Aldiss’ Non-Stop, a 1958 novel published in the US as Starship. What appears to be a primitive tribe living a simple farming life turns out to be the descendants of a multi-generational starship crew returning from a planet around Procyon, the ship’s systems largely out of control. The new focus on closed systems and their management should spin off some interesting fiction of its own as the innovative ideas of a living architecture take hold. For more on synthetic biology and self-repairing architectures, you can see Rachel Armstrong’s 2009 TED talk here.
by Paul Gilster | Sep 20, 2012 | Uncategorized |
It’s been heartening to see renewed interest in the space program’s past. Neil Armstrong’s death surely had something to do with it, for the scattering of his ashes at sea, which occurred while the 100 Year Starship Symposium was in session, was a reminder of the dramatic days when public fascination with space was intense and the whole world rejoiced at Apollo 11’s success. The memorial ceremony held at the National Cathedral in Washington the day before had focused everyone’s gaze on that great mission, which remained in the air throughout, a continuing counterpoint to formal discussions and casual conversations in the hallways.
Larry Klaes has passed along another historical marker, the fact that today could be called the 60th anniversary of the interplanetary probe. As in so many eventful astronautical moments, the British Interplanetary Society was involved. Eric Burgess and C. A. Cross had come to a BIS meeting in 1952 to read a paper called “The Martian Probe,” which took the concept of an Earth satellite and extended it into a package of instruments that could be sent to Mars. Interestingly, this was at a time when Wernher von Braun was championing the huge manned expeditions that would be written up in Collier’s, along with Chesley Bonestell’s stunning artwork.
The Collier’s series began in March of 1952, and it’s likely that an unmanned probe wouldn’t have caught the eye nearly as well as the Olympian designs of von Braun as rendered by Bonestell’s talented brush. But small, realistic probes were in play in Burgess’ and Cross’ work that would lead to the later successes of Mariner, Venera and Voyager. A message from Paolo Ulivi on the FPSPACE mailing list speculates that it was this paper that began the use of ‘probe’ to refer to unmanned robotic craft. He wonders if this is true and perhaps readers here will know the answer.
If you want to see a bit of history, then, the Burgess and Cross paper appeared in a 1953 issue of the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (Vol. 12, No. 2), and a subsequent lecture by Cross on ‘probe rockets’ was turned into a 1956 paper in JBIS (Vol. 16, No. 3). We can thus add yet another feather to the cap of BIS, the organization that studied moon landing missions as early as the 1930s and, of course, produced the first detailed study of a starship in Project Daedalus. As most readers of Centauri Dreams already know, JBIS has been at the forefront of interstellar studies for decades and we wish it continued success.
Sentinel in Solar Orbit
In the midst of the reflection on our past comes news from the B612 Foundation of what the organization is calling ‘major support’ from members of the business and financial community. The goal: To build, launch and operate a privately funded deep space mission called Sentinel. What B612 has in mind is placing a space telescope into a solar orbit up to 170 million miles from Earth, giving us a platform for discovering new asteroids and — as befits B612’s purpose — serving as an early warning mechanism for asteroids that could impact our planet.
On announcing the original mission in June of this year, B612’s CEO had this to say:
“The orbits of the inner solar system where Earth lies are populated with a half million asteroids larger than the one that struck Tunguska (June 30, 1908), and yet we’ve identified and mapped only about one percent of these asteroids to date, said Ed Lu, Space Shuttle, Soyuz, and Space Station Astronaut, now Chairman and CEO of the B612 Foundation. “During its 5.5-year mission survey time, Sentinel will discover and track half a million Near Earth Asteroids, creating a dynamic map that will provide the blueprint for future exploration of our Solar System, while protecting the future of humanity on Earth.”
Image: Sentinel’s orbit and field of view. Credit: B612 Foundation.
The organization is saying that in its first weeks of operation, Sentinel will surpass the total of Earth-crossing asteroids catalogued in all previous efforts, and in five years of operation, relaying data to the Deep Space Network, it will track 100 times more asteroids than have been found by all other telescopes combined. The infrared space telescope is being developed at Ball Aerospace by the same team that developed the Spitzer and Kepler space telescopes, with launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 currently planned for 2017-2018. The mission will perform a gravitational slingshot maneuver around Venus before settling into its final orbit around the Sun.
As we enter the age of commercial spaceflight, we can look back to the scientists, engineers and astronauts who made missions like these possible. It would be interesting to know whether Eric Burgess or C. A. Cross would have assumed probes like the ones descended from their model would emerge out of government or from private funding — we can remember the commercial streak in much science fiction of the era, like Heinlein’s “The Man Who Sold the Moon” (1950) in which the first lunar expedition is mounted by a businessman. Whatever the case, their probe ideas continue to resonate as private money now turns to deep space.
by Paul Gilster | Sep 19, 2012 | Culture and Society |
Because I utterly lack their skills, I have huge admiration for practical-minded people who can organize things well. Eric Davis’ work as track chair for the ‘Time and Distance Solutions’ track in Houston is a case in point. The challenge is in coping with a key fact of interstellar studies: We are so early in the game that we have not remotely figured out which propulsion method makes the most sense for journeys of this magnitude. Discussing time and distance means culling papers to find a balance of ideas, from what could be near-term (fusion, although it always seems near-term) to highly speculative (antimatter and nanotech).
Image: Physicist Eric Davis, a highly visible figure at the Houston conference.
Eric nailed the composition of the track, and it was because of that that I stayed in it through the conference. The temptation of getting involved with alternate tracks on ‘Becoming an Interstellar Civilization’ and especially ‘Destinations and Habitats’ was huge, but it was the time and distance problem that first drew me to interstellar studies so that is where I stayed. I’m hoping that Eric as well as several other track chairs will be able to offer their thoughts in future Centauri Dreams articles on how their sessions went.
Sleepless in Houston
Mae Jemison, who runs the 100 Year Starship organization, was everywhere, and I was beginning to wonder if she ever slept. She was in meetings all day Wednesday with the advisory council and later the track chairs, then in constant motion afterwards, a highly visible figure who never seemed to run out of energy. Gordon Gould and I asked her at lunch on Thursday about her flight aboard Endeavour in 1992, curious about what it is like to actually be blasted into space. We’ve all seen Shuttle launches and know how impressive, noisy and fearsome they can be.
But Mae said the effect was actually quite different. “You’re so wrapped up in padding and shielded from the noise that from inside, it’s just like being in the simulator. Remember that you have to hear all the communications inside the craft, so the noise seems very far away.” I had the same reaction a few months back when I asked Shuttle astronaut Drew Feistel, a veteran of Hubble Space Telescope repairs, whether that sweeping roll the Shuttle used to perform on liftoff was as dramatic from inside as it appeared to spectators. And the answer was no. Drew said you mostly felt acceleration, and that the roll maneuver felt very gradual and unobtrusive.
The job ahead of Mae’s group is, of course, enormous, and a huge part of that job will be to connect to a public that is both hamstrung by economic concerns and largely out of the kind of space mode we saw back in the Apollo days. My thought on that is that an organization like the 100 Year Starship can do a world of good by helping to get the word out about what interstellar issues really are. It’s surprising how few people realize the distances we’re talking about — when I first arrived in Houston, I cited in these pages the person who had emailed me with the question: “We’re already going to Pluto. How much harder can it be to go to a star?”
I gave a flip answer to that question in my earlier post, but it’s indicative of the mind-boggling nature of the time and distance conundrum and how little it is perceived by the public. I think we need to communicate how enormously challenging it will be to go to the stars at the same time that we provide a sound rationale for methodically looking at the problem. It is not using scare tactics to suggest that Earth’s history has been violent and that asteroid or comet impacts are not necessarily all in the past. And it is not being overly sanguine to say that the kind of solutions that will enable a crewed starship — maintaining sound ecologies, for example — are solutions that will have resonance on our own green planet and will help us to preserve it.
Spinoffs are always a touchy subject in spaceflight terms because they’re so easily ridiculed, and the average citizen is more likely to think of Tang than of GPS as a result of space research. But this is simply a hurdle that must be cleared for an organization with a 100-year mission to succeed. Learning how to propel a payload at a small percentage of lightspeed could have enormous ramifications for our production and use of energy on Earth, while the demand for autonomous systems will propel us into major advances in artificial intelligence and robotics. As one speaker noted, whether manned or not, a starship will demand autonomous systems.
Image: Mae Jemison addresses the crowd at Saturday night’s gala.
Into the Cosmic Sea
Let me close my Houston coverage with some thoughts about Jill Tarter. The SETI legend spoke to the symposium at large on Saturday in a short, inspiring talk outlining the search for Earth 2.0. We have yet to detect proof of an extraterrestrial civilization after 50 years of searching, but Tarter is doubling down on the need to keep looking given the small sample in our searches:
“Think about an Earth ocean as an analog. We’ve sampled the equivalent of one eight ounce glass out of that ocean in 50 years. Now you might get lucky and scoop up a fish when you do something like that, but chances are you wouldn’t. So our sample is small, inadequate. A cosmic ocean is out there beckoning us — the monumental task of sampling it remains… Our search must be audacious and inclusive. SETI trivializes the differences among us, and if it does nothing but expose every human being on the planet to this perspective, it will still have been one of the most significant events in human history.”
What might we pick up? Tarter said we will discover that Earth 2.0 in short order, meaning an Earth-mass planet in the habitable zone of a Sun-like star, but added that for it to truly be Earth 2.0, it will need to be inhabited. A technology we might detect could be anything from a beacon to a vast communications network, or perhaps huge shields against asteroid impacts or a completely unforeseen technology that could be generating radio or optical signals. “If we find technology, we can infer intelligence,” she added. “We can’t directly detect intelligence.”
Tarter’s message resonated with a crowd that, like her, believes we are a very young technology in a very old galaxy. A key question: Is it possible for a technological civilization to last for cosmic lengths of time? If the answer is no, Tarter believes SETI will fail, but of course we all hope the answer is yes. It was Philip Morrison, co-author of the first major paper on SETI, who called the idea “the archaeology of the future.” Sifting through the faint signals that impinge upon our dishes from the galaxy around us, we hope, unlike archaeologists, to find not just enigmatic remains but a living presence whose very existence will add meaning to our place in the cosmos.
In going forward, both in SETI and in the 100 Year Starship initiative, I’m reminded of Mae Jemison’s quote from Bash?, the greatest poet of the Edo period in Japan. Bash?’s wanderings into unknown country made him a legend, giving him material for his work and renewed purpose. He had learned from experience the lesson he conveyed here: “Seek not to follow in the footsteps of men of old; seek what they sought.”
by Paul Gilster | Sep 18, 2012 | Exotic Physics |
Sonny White’s work on exotic propulsion has galvanized the press, as witness this story in the Daily Mail, one of many articles in newspapers and online venues. I was fortunate enough to be in the sessions at the 100 Year Starship Symposium where White, an engaging and affable speaker, described what his team at Eagleworks Laboratories (Johnson Space Center) is doing. The issue at hand is whether a so-called ‘warp drive’ that distorts spacetime itself is possible given the vast amounts of energy it demands. White’s team believes the energy problem may not be as severe as originally thought.
Here I’ll quote Richard Obousy, head of Icarus Interstellar, who told Clara Moskowitz in Space.com: “Everything within space is restricted by the speed of light. But the really cool thing is space-time, the fabric of space, is not limited by the speed of light.”
On that idea hangs the warp drive. Physicists Michael Pfenning and Larry Ford went to work on Miguel Alcubierre’s 1994 paper, the first to examine the distortion of spacetime as a driver for a spacecraft, to discover that such a drive would demand amounts of energy beyond anything available in the known universe. And that was only the beginning. Alcubierre’s work demanded positive energy to contract spacetime in front of the vessel and negative energy to expand spacetime behind it. Given that we do not know whether negative energies densities can exist, much less be manipulated by humans, the work remained completely theoretical.
Image: A starship (in the center of the ring) taking advantage of the distortion of spacetime. Credit: Harold White.
But interesting things have developed since the original Alcubierre paper. Running quickly through what White told the Houston audience, Chris van Den Broeck was able to reduce the energy costs of a warp drive significantly and other theorists have continued to drop the numbers. White’s team has been examining ways to continue that progression, but what is eye-catching is that he is working on a laboratory experiment to “perturb spacetime by one part in ten million” using an instrument called the White-Juday Warp Field Interferometer to create the minute spacetime disruption.
I know of no teams other than White’s who are looking at lab work that could tell us whether a perturbation of spacetime can actually be created. From a NASA document on this work:
Across 1cm, the experimental rig should be able to measure space perturbations down to ~1 part in 10,000,000. As previously discussed, the canonical form of the metric suggests that boost may be the driving phenomenon in the process of physically establishing the phenomenon in a lab. Further, the energy density character over a number of shell thicknesses suggests that a toroidal donut of boost can establish the spherical region. Based on the expected sensitivity of the rig, a 1cm diameter toroidal test article (something as simple as a very high-voltage capacitor ring) with a boost on the order of 1.0000001 is necessary to generate an effect that can be effectively detected by the apparatus. The intensity and spatial distribution of the phenomenon can be quantified using 2D analytic signal techniques comparing the detected interferometer fringe plot with the test device off with the detected plot with the device energized.
So it’s interesting stuff, and it takes us to an even lower energy requirement, from the mass-energy of a planet the size of Jupiter to, in White’s view, a mass about the size of one of our Voyager probes. The reduction in the exotic matter/negative pressure required is managed by optimizing the warp bubble thickness and also by oscillating the bubble intensity, which according to White’s mathematics reduces the stiffness of spacetime. Thus we go from a Jupiter-sized portion of exotic matter to an amount weighing less than 500 kg.
White said the test was an attempt to prove that spacetime perturbation is possible, and likened it to a ‘Chicago pile moment.’ It was in 1942 that the first demonstration of a controlled nuclear reaction produced just half a watt of power, but a year later a four megawatt reactor was already in operation. With no tidal forces inside the warp bubble and a proper acceleration of zero, a future craft would be an undemanding platform in which to travel, and White pointed out that clocks aboard the spacecraft would move at the same rate as clocks back on Earth. It’s an exotic idea, but one that White’s lab testbed will now poke and prod to see if it’s possible.
Addendum: Al Jackson just sent me an email about other matters, but it includes a portion that’s specifically related to the above topic that I want to quote:
“I did my doctorial stuff in General Relativity. When I was in Austin for Armadillocon, last August, I asked my adviser, Richard Matzner, about the Alcubierre deal, since Richard does a lot of numerical GR he knows Alcubierre (who is an ace numerical GR guy), says he never heard him talk about his warp drive. Richard is not much interested in it either, thinks the solution is Lyapunov unstable. I have seen some works from Italy about Alcubierre and other ‘exotic matter’ warp solutions that show the models are unstable. Richard said he thinks Kip Thorne is no longer interested in it. I have never seen a really ‘heavy hitter’ like Hawking or Thorne, or a whole lot of other first string GR theorists ever remark on Alcubierre or the other recent solutions. There was a ‘name’ relativistist, William A. Hiscock, who did, he felt the solutions were not physical, but he thought people should keep trying. Alas that guy died young, only a few years ago.
But it is interesting that these solutions exist. I think, it’s going to take more imagination and further discoveries before something can be made of this.”
by Paul Gilster | Sep 17, 2012 | Culture and Society |
While I didn’t see too many technical glitches at the 100 Year Starship Symposium in Houston, I ran into plenty of them in my own attempts to cover the event. The banquet hall where the opening ceremonies were held — and where the plenary sessions occurred each day — was impervious to the hotel’s WiFi, so that I was unable to use Twitter. Friday’s technical sessions in the conference rooms went fine, and I managed to send out a steady stream of tweets from the ‘Time and Distance Solutions’ track. But halfway through the Saturday sessions, Twitter itself went down. I tried all afternoon to get on, but though my Net connection was strong, Twitter wouldn’t come up.
Image: Early arrivals setting up at the opening plenary session for the 100 Year Starship Symposium. Everything in order but the WiFi.
My experience with US Airways was about the same. The two flights out to Houston were uneventful, but coming back I was on an aircraft that reached new levels of passenger compression. With my knees hard up against the seat in front of me and that seat tilted back to maximum extent into my face, I could only close my eyes and pretend I was someplace else. We’ve all gone through things like this on packed flights, but I was reminded again why I have my 1000-mile rule. If a trip is anything less than 1000 miles, I’m going by rail or car. Period.
The Saturday science sessions were top-notch (congratulations to track chairman Eric Davis for his excellent work throughout the conference). Joe Ritter (University of Hawaii) gave an eye-opening talk about metamaterials, which he believes can reduce the cost of telescope fabrication by a factor of 100. This is heartening given the need to deploy big mirrors in space to look for and analyze exoplanet atmospheres. Joe’s team is looking at mirrors with what he describes as ‘photonic muscle,’ material that minimizes ambient light and can respond actively to conditions. Think of today’s adaptive optics extended in entirely new directions and available in ultralight models. A Hubble size mirror using some of these materials would weigh just 1 pound.
If you’re thinking not just of ground- or space-based telescopes but of starships, Joe’s huge, lightweight mirrors could be the basis of communication systems. For that matter, metamaterials like these can become involved in power generation and thermal regulation. There are even solar sail possibilities. In many ways the mission architectures becoming available to us will depend upon the advances in materials technology that this kind of work represents.
Vince Teofilo (Energy Innovations) ran through a conceptual design for a starship ark that he has been working on for the Space Colony Earth project, which involves repositories on Earth, the Moon and a starship that are seen as ways of preserving digital data and human DNA information. What Space Colony Earth has in mind is guarding against mass extinctions of the kind that felled the dinosaurs. A robotic long-haul starship of the kind Vince described would target a star with an Earth-like planet and would include experiments to be run en-route to provide data for future, faster interstellar missions. Among the propulsion options are an inertial electrostatic confinement space thruster developed by George Miley (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), though Vince examined a range of alternatives.
Image: The view from outside my 19th floor room at the Hyatt Regency. An MD friend of mine, back in the days when this kind of hotel design was just coming in, looked up at such a scene at a conference and exclaimed “This is Babylon!” Well not quite, but the Hyatt was a good venue.
Icarus Interstellar was all over the science sessions, and the two I attended on Saturday covered recent work involving what the team is learning about the original Daedalus design. Robert Freeland (Podtrac), discussing a paper he did in conjunction with science fiction author Stephen Baxter, noted that the Daedalus team’s calculations had largely been validated, though some aspects were in need of a tune-up. Remember that Daedalus came out of the 1970s, its team working in loose association using slide rules and pencils rather than computers. Freeland described an early Icarus iteration that would reduce payload to 50 tons from Daedalus’ 450 thanks to advances in miniaturization, with an additional set of fuel tanks for each stage and full deceleration into the Alpha Centauri system. Mission time: just under 100 years.
You would think that an Alpha Centauri probe might swing by Proxima Centauri in some way on its way to Centauri A and B, but the scenario turns out to be surprisingly difficult to manage given the speeds involved on the way to the ultimate destination, as Freeland described. Splitting off a flyby probe targeting Proxima after the acceleration of the main probe is perhaps a possibility, but the primary probe still decelerates into the Centauri AB system, with the latter probe dividing into separate probes for the exploration of each star’s (assumed) planetary system.
Still up in the air are issues like inertial confinement fusion and whether it will become the final choice of the Icarus design team. The continuing work at the National Ignition Facility has shown how tricky it is to compress a fuel pellet with lasers symmetrically. A final, major question: How do you do a re-start if the system shuts down? The Daedalus Final Report did not address the problem, and the Icarus team will explore this along with the question of mis-fires and how they could damage the reaction chamber.
Image: Hard at work in the ‘Time and Distance Solutions’ track.
Pat Galea, who gave three papers on Icarus topics, presented his third in place of author Adam Crowl, who could not be in Houston. Crowl was looking at efficient braking mechanisms for an interstellar probe entering its destination system, wondering about the feasibility of magnetic sail braking in which an artificial magnetosphere interacts with the interstellar medium. The magnetosphere itself is created with a huge ring of superconducting wire attached to the vehicle. Magsails turn out to help reduce overall system mass significantly when compared to other methods in a Daedalus-class vehicle.
Finally, Rob Adams (MSFC) discussed the Decade Module Two (DM2) device his team is reassembling after its donation to the University of Alabama at Huntsville. Located at the UAH Aerophysics Laboratory at nearby Redstone Arsenal, the device was originally developed to model the effects of thermonuclear explosions, but can be productively put to work in a variety of fusion experiments ranging from magnetic nozzle tests to the simulation of a solar mass ejection. In a so-called Z-pinch, current applied to plasma by a large bank of capacitors creates a magnetic field that pinches the plasma into a small cylinder to reach fusion conditions. See Z-Pinch: Firing Up Fusion in Huntsville for more.
Image: Rob Adams describing the DM2 and its potential.
Can plasma explosions generated by the Z-pinch be directed into a flow of thrust of the kind that would drive a spacecraft? Fusion-pulsed propulsion may one day be practical, but it will take experiments with equipment like the DM2 to help us find out. All this work is obviously in the early stages of development and it won’t be until the spring of next year that high-power testing could begin, assuming the assembly continues to go well and funding is forthcoming. Adams noted that the DM2 facility will also be made available to outside experimenters.
