When young Rod Hyde, fresh out of MIT, started working on starship design in mid-1972, there were not many fusion-based precedents for what he was up to. He had taken a summer job that would turn into a career at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, but right off...
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Fusion and the Starship: Early Concepts
Having looked at the Z-pinch work in Huntsville yesterday, we've been kicking around the question of fusion for propulsion and when it made its first appearance in science fiction. The question is still open in the comments section and I haven't been able to pin down...
Z-Pinch: Powering Up Fusion in Huntsville
The road to fusion is a long slog, a fact that began to become apparent as early as the 1950s. It was then that the ZETA -- Zero-Energy Toroidal (or Thermonuclear) Assembly -- had pride of place as the fusion machine of the future, or so scientists working on the...
Catalyzed Fusion: Tuning Up the Ramjet
Long-time Centauri Dreams readers have learned to tolerate my eccentricities (or, at least, they’re kind enough not to dwell on them). One of them is my love of poking around in old books related to space travel, which is how Benjamin Field’s A Narrative of the...
Icarus: Fusion and Secondary Technologies
Discovery News now offers fully ten articles on Project Icarus and its background, written by the Icarus team and assembled on the site by Ian O'Neill. I was startled to realize how the list had grown, but it reminds me to point periodically to this collection,...
Icarus: The Motivations for Fusion
If you haven't read George Dyson's fascinating history of Project Orion, let me recommend it to you highly. Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship (Henry Holt, 2002) fires the imagination with the audacity of the project, a nuclear pulse rocket that...
A Workable Fusion Starship?
by Adam Crowl In the market for a mammoth starship? Recently released work by Friedwardt Winterberg, discussed here by Adam Crowl, points to fast interplanetary travel and implies possibilities in the interstellar realm that are innovative and ingenious. Adam notes in...
Carnival Notes: Fusion and Dark Energy
Is nuclear fusion easier to exploit in space than on Earth? Surprisingly, harnessing the power that drives the Sun may be a simpler challenge in propulsion terms than creating clean, safe power supplies for our planet. So says Brian Wang, whose NextBigFuture site...
A Micro-Fusion Descendant of Daedalus
Back in 1966, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Dwain Spencer laid out the principles of a fusion engine that burned deuterium and helium-3 (an isotope of helium with a nucleus of two protons and one neutron). Deuterium and helium-3 make a good combination for rocket...
Another Small Step Toward Fusion?
We're a long way from achieving practical fusion to supply our power needs, much less fusion rockets to the stars. Just how far can be gauged by a look at current research. The principle seems straightforward: Heat hot, ionized gas to the point of ignition and you can...