Fusion runways remind me of the propulsion methods using pellets that have been suggested over the years in the literature. Before the runway concept emerged, the idea of firing pellets at a departing spacecraft was developed by Clifford Singer. Aware of the...
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The Interstellar Fusion Runway Evolves
Let’s talk about how to get a spacecraft moving without onboard propellant. As noted last week, this is apropos of the design shown in the Netflix streaming video take on Liu Cixin’s novels, which the network titles ‘3 Body Problem.’ There, a kind of ‘runway’ is...
An Alternative Take on Fusion Fuel
Let’s talk about fusion fuels in relation to the recent discussion of building a spacecraft engine. A direct fusion drive (DFD) system using magnetic mirror technologies is, as we saw last time, being investigated at the University of Maryland in its Centrifugal...
A Fusion Drive Using Centrifugal Mirror Technologies
I want to drop back to fusion propulsion at this point, as it bears upon the question of a Solar System-wide infrastructure that we looked at last time. We know that even chemical propulsion is sufficient to get to Mars, but clearly, reducing travel times is critical...
Interstellar Path? Helicity’s Bid for In-Space Fusion
Be aware that the Interstellar Research Group has made the videos shot at its Montreal symposium available. I find this a marvelous resource, and hope I never get jaded with the availability of such materials. I can remember hunting desperately for background on talks...
SunVoyager: A Fast Fusion Mission Beyond the Heliosphere
1000 AU makes a fine target for our next push past the heliosphere, keeping in mind that good science is to be had all along the way. Thus if we took 100 years to get to 1000 AU (and at Voyager speeds it would be a lot longer than that), we would still be gathering...
Musings on Fusion and the Interstellar Ramjet
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...
A Fusion Runway to Deep Space?
Beamed propulsion concepts are usually conceived in terms of laser or microwave beams pushing a lightsail. But as we've seen over the years, there are other ways of thinking about these things. Clifford Singer went to work back in the 1970s on the concept of pellet...
A $100 Million Infusion for SETI Research
SETI received a much needed boost this morning as Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner, along with physicist Stephen Hawking and a panel including Frank Drake, Ann Druyan, Martin Rees and Geoff Marcy announced a $100 million pair of initiatives to reinvigorate the search....
Cultural Diffusion and SETI
What happens to us if our SETI efforts pay off? Numerous scenarios come to mind, all of them speculative, but the range of responses shown in Carl Sagan's Contact may be something like the real outcome, with people of all descriptions reading into a distant message...