World’s 1st nuclear fusion-powered electric propulsion drive unveiled - Interesting Engineering
https://interestingengineering.com/space/nuclear-fusion-powered-electric-propulsion-driveOpen linkView original on lemmy.world204
Comments25https://interestingengineering.com/space/nuclear-fusion-powered-electric-propulsion-driveOpen linkView original on lemmy.world
The headline’s a bit misleading. The drive is a plasma thruster, and the company found that by adding Boronated water to the exhaust the plasma would fuse with some of the boron creating a kind of afterburner effect, not a sustained fusion reaction. It’s kind of interesting as a way to boost the performance of the plasma thruster, but not “OMG it’s a Fusion Drive!!!” interesting.
Yeah, that's the fault of the article author. The actual press release uses "fusion-enhanced" which is a lot more honest.
To be fair, they're quoting a 50% increase in thrust so it's not completely clickbait to say "fusion powered" but it definitely does give the wrong picture.
Imagine all this work/research on fusion and some dudes like oh yeah my space engine does that
Fusion is easy. Getting net energy out is hard.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor
Wasn't there an rocket concept like that from the 70's, using the freed electrons for containement or something? I saw it once on Wikipedia and then never found it again.
There has been some fusor research going on for decades. The issue that killed that direction of fusion research was ultimately that the electrons do not behave as the initial simple models suggested and in the real world the power loss from the fast electrons is just too big for any reasonably sized device to allow for self sustaining fusion.
Basically this. Look at all the big fusion reactor projects - they've been going for decades and JUST NOW hit a very miniscule amount of net output within the past several months.
But do they stack in my inventory?
Only the small grid version, which we haven’t unlocked yet
The first step in designing a fusion reactor is picking where to hide the power source
This is actual snake oil
What the fuck kind of snakes do you have living around you?
Nuclear snakes
Pritchard?
O.o
What is this cube and how does it relate to the drive?
When you plug two of them into each other it goes twice as fast.
And 3 to make a sun into a torus.
That’s what it looks like when it’s about 50% complete. At that point you need like 2000 steel plates and it’s a pretty slow grind.
Not exactly inspiring any confidence trying to pass that AI-generated monstrosity as a photo of the device.
Minecraft command block?
I beg to differ. I present - the Ford Nucleon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Nucleon
This was a concept. The linked article claims demonstration. Big difference.
It was a joke. WTF