Proton-proton fusion produces 99 percent of the Sun’s energy, in a process that begins with two hydrogen nuclei and ends with one helium nucleus, releasing energy along the way. We’d love to exploit the fusion process to create energy for our own directed uses, which is what Robert Bussard was thinking about with his interstellar ramjet when he published the idea in 1960. Such a ship might deploy electromagnetic fields thousands of kilometers in diameter to scoop up atoms from the interstellar medium, using them as reaction mass for the fusion that would drive it.

Carl Sagan was a great enthusiast for the concept, and would describe it vividly in the book he wrote with Russian astronomer and astrophysicist Iosif S. Shklovskii. In Intelligent Life in the Universe (1966), the authors discuss a journey that takes advantage of time dilation, allowing a lightspeed-hugging starship powered by these methods to reach galactic center in a mere 21 years of ship-time; i.e., time as perceived by the crew, while of course tens of thousands of years are going by back on Earth. If you also hear echoes of Poul Anderson’s Tau Zero here, you’re exactly on target.

Shklovskii and Sagan assume proton-proton fusion as the reaction, as Bussard originally did, but Thomas Heppenheimer was able to show in 1978 that it would take more power to compress the protons gathered from the interstellar medium than the reaction would produce. Ramscoops are tricky, and this is just one of their problems — gathering interstellar materials is another, dependent as it is on the density of the gases where the starship travels. Drag is yet another issue, making interstellar ramjets a segue into magsail deceleration rather than starship-enabling speed, though it’s a segue I’ll follow up on another occasion.

But the fusion itself is still interesting. If Bussard assumed proton-proton, it wouldn’t be long before Daniel Whitmire was able to show that a different reaction could produce far more power. The Carbon Nitrogen Oxygen cycle (CNO cycle) came to mind this morning because of word that the team working on the Borexino experiment in the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (Italy), which studies the Sun’s fusion reactions through the neutrinos it produces, has been able to identify the CNO cycle as a small component of the Sun’s production of energy.

Image: The Borexino research team has succeeded in detecting neutrinos from the sun’s second fusion process, the Carbon Nitrogen Oxygen cycle (CNO cycle) for the first time. Credit: Borexino Collaboration.

That’s interesting in itself and confirms work by Hans Bethe and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker from the 1930s, the first experimental confirmation of their independent investigations. But I cycle back to Bussard’s ramjet. The Carbon Nitrogen Oxygen cycle involves four hydrogen nuclei combining to form a helium nucleus using carbon, nitrogen and oxygen as catalysts and intermediate products in the reaction. Maybe ‘catalysts’ isn’t the right word — I was reminded by reading Adam Crowl’s thoughts on the matter some years back that we’re not talking about chemical catalysis and should perhaps refer to all this simply as ‘nuclear chemistry.’

What boggles the mind about the CNO cycle, which I’ve read is the dominant energy source in stars more than 1.3 times more massive than the Sun, is the degree of energy unlocked by it, far exceeding uncatalyzed proton/proton fusion. And it would take something highly energetic to work on Bussard’s ramscoop, for Whitmire’s 1975 paper showed that a proton-proton reactor built in the fashion originally suggested by Bussard would need a scoop 7,000 kilometers across to make the reaction work.

Isn’t that odd? You would think that a reaction that powers the Sun would be perfectly sufficient to drive the Bussard ramjet, but it turns out that the rate of proton-proton fusion is too low. Looking back through my materials on the problem, I find that the Sun produces less than 1 watt per cubic meter when averaged over its whole volume, which means that the energy produced in a light bulb filament is more powerful. Whitmire realized that the Sun’s vast energy output could occur because of its size. Making equally massive starships is out of the question.

It turns out that Whitmire and Centauri Dreams regular Al Jackson were friends at the University of Texas back in the 1970s, and I’ll remind you of Al’s reminiscence of Whitmire that can be found here — it was actually Al who introduced the Bussard ramscoop idea to Whitmire. Bussard would write to Whitmire that his 1975 paper offered a solution to the proton-proton fusion problem and would “become an enduring classic in this field.”

If you know your science fiction, you’ll recall that Greg Benford uses the CNO cycle in his 1984 novel Across the Sea of Suns, where he gives a poetic description of the process at work as perceived by his protagonist via the ultimate in futuristic telepresence:

He watches plumes of carbon nuclei striking the swarms of protons, wedding them to form the heavier hydrogen nuclei. The torrent swirls and screams at Nigel’s skin and in his sensors he sees and feels and tastes the lumpy, sluggish nitrogen as it finds a fresh incoming proton and with the fleshy smack of fusion the two stick, they hold, they wobble like raindrops — falling together — merging — ballooning into a new nucleus, heavier still: oxygen.

But the green pinpoints of oxygen are unstable. These fragile forms split instantly. Jets of new particles spew through the surrounding glow — neutrinos, ruddy photons of light, and slower, darker, there come the heavy daughters of the marriage: a swollen, burnt-gold cloud. A wobbling, heavier isotope of nitrogen….

Ahead he sees the violet points of nitrogen and hears them crack into carbon plus an alpha particle. So in the end the long cascade gives forth the carbon that catalyzed it, carbon that will begin again its life in the whistling blizzard of protons coming in from the forward maw of the ship.

And there you are: Carbon – Nitrogen – Oxygen in a cycle that makes starship fusion work. And all of this reminiscing suggested by the results of an experiment deep below the the Italian Gran Sasso massif which has turned up evidence for the CNO cycle within the Sun, a small but ongoing component of its output. If you want to read more on what turned up at Borexino, the paper is The Borexino Collaboration, “Experimental evidence of neutrinos produced in the CNO fusion cycle in the Sun,” Nature 587 (2020), 577-582 (abstract). The Whitmire paper is “Relativistic Spaceflight and the Catalytic Nuclear Ramjet,” Acta Astronautica 2 (1975), pp. 497-509 (abstract).

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