"The fusion fuel we're focusing on is deuterium [a stable isotope of hydrogen] and Li6 [a stable isotope of the metal lithium] in a crystal structure," Txchnologist quotes team member and aerospace engineering Ph.D. candidate Ross Cortez saying. "That's basically dilithium crystals we're using." Let's pause and savor that for a moment. Dilithium crystals. Awesome.
I never could figure out how Impulse Engines worked on Star Trek - I only knew they didn’t hold a candle to Warp Drive.
But given where we are today, just having sub-light Impulse Engines isn’t all that bad, and I’d LOVE to see it put into use.
Awesome! Though Star Trek lore has impulse drive maximum speed pegged at around 25% the speed of light.
UAHuntsville student seeking ‘Holy Grail’ of rocket propulsion system
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. – Can a device formerly used to test nuclear weapons effects find a new life in rocket propulsion research? That is the question in which researchers at The University of Alabama in Huntsville seek an answer.
A new massive device is being assembled at the university’s Aerophysics Research Center on Redstone Arsenal, where a team of scientists and researchers from UAHuntsville’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Boeing and Marshall Space Flight Center’s Propulsion Engineering Lab are busy putting together a strange looking machine they’re calling the “Charger-1 Pulsed Power Generator.” It’s a key element in furthering the development of nuclear fusion technology to drive spacecraft.
The huge apparatus, known as the Decade Module Two (DM2) in its earlier life, was used on a contract with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) for research into the effects of nuclear weapons explosions.
Has Scotty inspected it yet?
Okay, okay knock it off and get back to work. We have muslims to placate here at NASA. No time for this “space travel” nonsense. Seesh.
Whether it’s this engine or not, I always thought the old fire a rocket once on this end, travel for 6 months, then fire a slow down rocket approach is crazy.
If you just have an engine that can operate for the whole trip as needed, you are there in a few weeks.
DANGER: Impulse Engine Overload Causes 97 Megaton Explosion.
Science fiction is great. It takes dreams and makes them, well, into books and movies. Dream on!
All of a sudden, there's an asteroid right in front of us.....what to do?
You can get there even faster if you don’t worry about how you slow down... SPLAT!
Fine....go to Mars in six weeks.....your luggage went to Venus and you won’t see it for five years. Your underwear is going to be pretty stinky. Then, you’ll see some real fights.
We’ve had fission engines since the 1960’s. Those went nowhere.
One sleepless night many years ago I speculated that out of an ideal fusion engine you could get something like 40 000 pounds of thrust per gram of fuel per second.
If this could be achieved, you could completely change the architecture of rockets going into Earth orbit, and far beyond.
Your basic vehicle to Earth orbit would be a platform with a number of fusion rockets on its underside. The platform would be a space frame with enough internal volume for the engines and for the basic operating crew and some passengers. It might be on the order of 50 feet in diameter. The payload (which could also be a passenger compartment) would ride on the top surface of the platform with a fairly simple and light dome fairing over it.
But how could such a large frontal area (50ft diameter) object reach orbital speeds without busting up in the atmosphere, you might ask.
Well, the nuclear fuel has a specific impulse many orders of magnitude beyond chemical rocket fuels. You could load up the platform to a gross weight of, say, a million pounds, most of which would be payload. 50 kilos of this nuclear fuel would be enough to power the entire loaded platform to high orbit, and back again.
You’d rise up in the atmosphere at perhaps 200 feet per second, no more. Even at this leisurely rate, you’d be above most of the atmosphere in 10 or 15 minutes, at which time you could boost the thrust to give you a modest 1.25 G or so, and complete your trip to orbit in a total flight time of about 45 minutes, powered all the way, miind you.
Coming back would NOT involve “re-entry” as we know it today. It would just be the exact reverse profile of the ascent; powered all the way.
All made possible, in theory of course, by nuclear rockets of the general kind I mentioned at the beginning.
And if you have a craft that can get into Earth orbit that easily, why stop there?