Can a Seattle Startup Launch a Fusion Reactor Into Space? (ieee.org) 129
"Practical nuclear fusion is, famously, always 10 years in the future," reports IEEE Spectrum. "Except that the Pentagon recently gave an award to a tiny startup to launch a fusion power system into space in just five..."
Avalanche Energy Designs, based near a Boeing facility in Seattle...is working on modular "micro fusion packs," small enough to hold in your hand yet capable of powering everything from electric cars to spaceships. Last month, the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) announced it had awarded Avalanche an unspecified sum to develop its Orbitron fusion device to generate either heat or electricity, with the aim of powering a high-efficiency propulsion system aboard a prototype satellite in 2027....
Avalanche's Orbitron... could theoretically fit on a tabletop. It relies on the Ph.D. thesis of Tom McGuire, a student working on inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC) fusion at MIT in 2007... McGuire's IEC work languished until it caught the attention of two engineers working at Blue Origin: Robin Langtry and Brian Riordan. In 2018, they formed Avalanche Energy as a side hustle, eventually leaving Blue Origin in the summer of 2021. In March of this year Avalanche emerged from stealth with $5 million in venture-capital funding and a staff of 10, although Avalanche's official address is still a single-family home in Seattle.
Avalanche's website proudly proclaims: "We see our fusion power packs as the foundation for creating a world with abundant clean water, healthy oceans, vast rain forests, and immense glaciers in healthy equilibrium." A patent application filed by Langtry and Riordan contains some details of how their Orbitron may function. It describes an orbital containment system on the order of tens of centimeters in size, where a beam of fuel ions interacts with an electrostatic field to enter an elliptical orbit about an inner electrode. The application describes a system where ions last for a second or more — 10 times as long as in McGuire's simulations, and long enough for each ion to complete millions of orbits in the reactor. An article in GeekWire published as Avalanche exited stealth mode included a claim that the company had already produced neutrons via fusion.
Avalanche envisages small fusion packs with 5- to 15-kilowatt capacity, operating either on their own or grouped by the hundreds for megawatt-scale clean-energy solutions. The Pentagon is interested in the packs to potentially enable small spacecraft to maneuver freely in deep space, with higher power payloads.
The challenge now is for Avalanche to move from a 15-year old Ph.D. thesis in simulation to a working prototype in space, in just 60 months.
Avalanche's Orbitron... could theoretically fit on a tabletop. It relies on the Ph.D. thesis of Tom McGuire, a student working on inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC) fusion at MIT in 2007... McGuire's IEC work languished until it caught the attention of two engineers working at Blue Origin: Robin Langtry and Brian Riordan. In 2018, they formed Avalanche Energy as a side hustle, eventually leaving Blue Origin in the summer of 2021. In March of this year Avalanche emerged from stealth with $5 million in venture-capital funding and a staff of 10, although Avalanche's official address is still a single-family home in Seattle.
Avalanche's website proudly proclaims: "We see our fusion power packs as the foundation for creating a world with abundant clean water, healthy oceans, vast rain forests, and immense glaciers in healthy equilibrium." A patent application filed by Langtry and Riordan contains some details of how their Orbitron may function. It describes an orbital containment system on the order of tens of centimeters in size, where a beam of fuel ions interacts with an electrostatic field to enter an elliptical orbit about an inner electrode. The application describes a system where ions last for a second or more — 10 times as long as in McGuire's simulations, and long enough for each ion to complete millions of orbits in the reactor. An article in GeekWire published as Avalanche exited stealth mode included a claim that the company had already produced neutrons via fusion.
Avalanche envisages small fusion packs with 5- to 15-kilowatt capacity, operating either on their own or grouped by the hundreds for megawatt-scale clean-energy solutions. The Pentagon is interested in the packs to potentially enable small spacecraft to maneuver freely in deep space, with higher power payloads.
The challenge now is for Avalanche to move from a 15-year old Ph.D. thesis in simulation to a working prototype in space, in just 60 months.
I can think of a brand name! (Score:2)
Re: I can think of a brand name! (Score:2)
Where will they find bans peels and coffee grounds in space
Re: (Score:2)
a few years after the space tourism industry takes off I'm sure you'll find all that and more conveniently in low Earth orbit.
Farnsworth fusor (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
This has got to be the Farnsworth fusor technology. Half century old in fact. Not new but perhaps not allowed before.
I had to look this up. For a minute there, I thought you were making a Futurama reference.
Re:Farnsworth fusor (Score:5, Funny)
Futurama was making a reality reference.
Re: (Score:2)
This has got to be the Farnsworth fusor technology. Half century old in fact. Not new but perhaps not allowed before.
Closer to a century. Farnsworth started working on it in the 1930s.
Space schmace (Score:2)
If someone were to actually invent an economically viable fusion reactor, that would be the biggest tech news of the century. End of story.
Whether it fits on a spaceship is utterly irrelevant. Given that "space" is featured in the title of this thread, my guess is that they have not in fact invented an economically viable fusion reactor.
Subs and space have different "economical" (Score:2, Troll)
> If someone were to actually invent an economically viable fusion reactor ...
> Whether it fits on a spaceship is utterly irrelevant. Given that "space" is featured in the title of this thread, my guess is that they have not in fact invented an economically viable fusion reactor.
You may have noticed that space probes and large submarines typically use nuclear power. While airplanes and ships do not. That's because "economically viable" is very different in outer space and the deep ocean. Remove "gas u
If the title of an article is a question... (Score:2)
And this is of course no exception.
Re: (Score:2)
... the answer is always no. And this is of course no exception.
You are correct. Especially when one recognizes that the Seattle startup in question has no lift capacity.
Can Space-X launch a fusion reactor into space? Possibly. Can Avalanche? Nope. Can Avalanche pay someone like Space-X? Maybe. But the question as asked? No.
Re: (Score:2)
If Avalanche can actually do what they are trying to get, getting to space will be trivial.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, not really. Fusion rockets still have a similar radioactive exhaust problem to fission rockets. In fact all the "easy" fusion reactions actually produce far more neutron radiation per watt than fission does. So operating them in the atmosphere is probably not a good idea.
We still need other options for getting to space. However, nuclear engines (even fission) are a game changer for getting between low Earth orbit and the rest of the solar system.
Re: If the title of an article is a question... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Most nuclear rocket designs (excluding bomb-propelled Orion-style) don't exhaust the nuclear itself fuel - instead they use it to generate superheated gases (often steam) as propellant.
Basically the propellant takes on the same role in a rocket as the primary coolant does in a power station. In both cases you want it to absorb as many of the emitted neutrons as possible, both because those neutrons carry a sizable fraction of the total reaction power - and because the alternative is to have them absorbed b
Re: (Score:2)
the Good the Bad and the Ugly (Score:2)
No, no, no... (Score:2)
The good news is that those 5 million of dollars being wasted are venture-capital funding.
The bad news is that the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Unit is wasting unknown amounts of taxpayer money on magic beans, fairy dust and happy thoughts.
The ugly is that the bad part, unlike the good part, can continue indefinitely.
Regardless of how much money gets piled up and burned trying to launch those magic beans into space with fairy dust and happy thoughts.
Re: (Score:2)
Not to create a fusion rocket engine, certainly.
However, the big news seems to be a new, relatively simple approach to a Farnsworth fusor that should result in massively greater ion re-circulation using a voltage gradiant across a series of precisely shaped nested electrode grids in the center, creating "ion beam lenses" to dramatically reduce the efficiency-killing electrode collisions.
$5 mil could well be enough to prove whether such a relatively simple improvement can in fact deliver anything like the pr
10? (Score:2)
Nice to see that it's not 20 anymore. At this rate, 20 years from now it will always be only 5 years away.
It is a suppository shape magnetic confinement (Score:2)
Why not. Thomas J. McGuire also has a patent in 2018 for a magnetic field plasma confinement device, but no diagram.
https://scholar.google.com/cit... [google.com]
Why space? (Score:3)
Why would they put this thing into space before even ironing out it's fundamental design parameters in fixed location applications (power plants/test reactors)? Does it function better in a micro-gravity environment? RTFA and it didn't seem to mention anything about that aspect. And I don't think producing neutrons (at least small amounts of them) is a big deal as garage fusioneers have been doing that for years, of course it takes a boatload of electricity for them to even create a very small reaction. The problem has never really been creating a fusion reaction, it has been generating it on a reasonable scale (not a bomb) and in a reaction that takes less energy to sustain than it produces.
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
Re:Why space? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
And you think that investors are so stupid that they invest into scams?
Seriously?
If that was the case you and me would scam investors al day long ...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It's probably bullshit and they're trying to con some other nation (like China or NK) into believing it's happening. But what if you had a design that was only viable in free fall for some reason?
Re: (Score:2)
Because in space you have a cheap - and hard - vacuum. On earth not so much.
And: if the device can produce a small amount of energy it might be useful for an ion drive.
Re: (Score:2)
You know, for "maintenance" work.
Re: (Score:2)
Because it's pretty unlikely they can actually make a fusion reactor that can produce more electricity than it consumes, and a fusion rocket doesn't need to do that.
Re: (Score:2)
We aren't even to the point where electricity has entered into the situation, we haven't reached any kind of ENERGY break even point (IE put in 1 MW of energy and get 1 MW of additional thermal energy back out) that I am aware of. If you aren't producing more ENERGY from the reaction than what is put into the system it is most likely less than worthless given the increase in mass and complexity. Baring some interesting (and unlikely) quirk in the reaction that allows for much more energetic exhaust veloci
Re: (Score:2)
All fusion reactions produce energy. "Breakeven" is where the reaction itself produces more than you put in. Conservation of energy says that bit you put in is still kicking around no matter how much the reaction makes.
Propulsion involves starting with energy and reaction mass, putting them together, and making that mass go as fast as practical in one direction. Importantly, at least once you're in space, the limiting factor isn't how much energy you've got, it's how fast you can make that exhaust go. Chemi
Seriously? (Score:2, Interesting)
So that startup is based on a 1977 thesis of an MIT PhD, but it's ironic that a different and more recent (1995) MIT PhD thesis shows that net energy gain from IEC is impossible. Reference: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/... [mit.edu]
Re: (Score:2)
Note, I am not claiming to know which one is right. Though Todd's thesis seems to make a very compelling case. Todd's thesis is well known so I presume these guys know it too. Maybe it isn't a big deal for their particular propulsion configuration? Who knows?
Re: Seriously? (Score:2)
No one cares about it being impossible. No really. The Lu just wave their hands and say magic words and the investors hand over the money. Every time.
Iâ(TM)m not kidding. I talked to a guy who wrote a paper in 1998 explaining precisely why TAEs reactor could it possibly work. They came up with eight reasons and just gave up for lunch. Not one person has ever followed up, I was the first person to ask about it. The company has received hundreds of millions of dollars from people that donâ(TM)t eve
Re: (Score:2)
You don't need to produce net electricity for propulsion. No rocket does.
Re: (Score:2)
If you're using the fusion reactor as the power source for your drive, it needs to produce net *energy*, regardless of whether that's electricity, light, heat, or whatever. If you have some other power source (solar panels, maybe), and the fusion reactor is simply there to accelerate the fuel out the back end, then it doesn't need to produce net energy.
Re: (Score:2)
the thesis is from 2007, not 1977 (that is McGuire's **birth date**). Please don't add to the noise.
And McGuire discusses Todd Rider's **earlier** thesis.
Re: (Score:2)
You are right, I jumped the gun on that.
Add "on internet" and patent it (Score:2)
How does doing something in space make it easier?
Re: (Score:2)
that question is asked, and to some extent answered, above your post.
No (Score:3)
In 5 years, they'll just fold after having made some "progress reports". The CEO of this "startup" has mysteriously received $5M.
After those 5 years an investigation will be launched, and the CEO will be discovered to have run several scams already in the past. By that time the man will have departed to some foreign country with no extradition treaty and enjoying a life of pleasure.
No. (Score:2)
No. They could however launch a boxcar of bullshit into space. Didn't Elon Musk do that?
Re: (Score:2)
No, but he did launch a car he first proposed to sell to the public in 2014 [wikipedia.org] ... that's similar for all relevant purposes.
Monty Python did it (Score:2)
(Referring to the sun of course instead of a grail.)
Surely no one will fall for this (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm a big fan of space but why in gods name would someone think space propulsion was the best first case use of this?
The orbitron site is remarkably content free - except for a picture that looks a lot like an arc-reactor from Iron Man (which in case they missed it was a MOVIE, not reality). A very broad range of fusion devices of a similar type have been shown to be impossible. If they have some trick everyone else has missed, then they will soon be making the world a much better place, and themselves vastly wealthy - but the website gives no hint of what that trick is, nor any experimental data to indicate that it exists.
Re: (Score:2)
but why in gods name would someone think space propulsion was the best first case use of this? ... erm, useful.
Because it is by far the simplest way to use it for something
You have a vacuum, strong electric fields, a fusion reaction -> an ion/plasma drive.
On earth you had a hot chamber, which you hardly can use for anything.
Re: (Score:2)
Alternately, as soon as you mention space, investors tend to disengage the brain and not look at the actual product you're hawking.
Re: (Score:2)
I doubt such investors exist.
At least I never met one.
Investing is usually a multi stage operation, there is no money coming anymore when the first stage(s) fail. If the investors have the slightest hint that you defrauded them: the fraud case is incoming.
No idea in what fantasy world you are living, that you think otherwise.
Re: (Score:3)
We already have the technology to solve the climate crisis. What we don't have is the political will.
Even if someone invented a working fusion reactor tomorrow, presumably the reaction would be the same as it has been to renewables. Update too slow, vested interests lobbying hard against it, a list of 8 reasons why fission is better from world-nuclear.org...
Re: (Score:2)
Spacecraft propulsion doesn't require power production. A fusion reaction with a Q of 1 will not be self sustaining, but will still double the power output of a fusion propulsion system.
Let me guess: (Score:2)
Uncle Sam, i.e. us, gets ripped off yet again. *sigh*
Can it be launched? (Score:2)
Yes, it's very easy to launch a small fusion reactor into space. Now, will the reactor produce energy? That's the hard part.
As long as we're 'assuming' a fusion reactor... (Score:2)
...they can just use the Easter Bunny to load it onto Santa's sleigh and he'll carry it as high as he can before handing off to the Tooth Fairy to take it orbital.
I know, because an AI told me.
Re: (Score:2)
Containment on the Sun (Score:2)
Containment on the Sun comes from gravity. If you accelerated the ship fast enough, you could get containment from acceleration. This is one fusion concept that would work in space but not on Earth, since reactors accelerating fast enough to contain fusion reactions are hypersonic missiles on steroids which is generally not desirable for a power plant. OTOH, that's probably not what they're attempting and you might need an initial acceleration for containment that's already impractical, not to mention th
Re: (Score:2)
Containment on the Sun comes from gravity. If you accelerated the ship fast enough, you could get containment from acceleration.
No you couldn't. Mass amplification is not present in the reference frame of the spacecraft - just as viewed from outside at a different relative velocity. (Even if you could use it for gravitational containment for fusion you'd need to first accelerate to within a tad of lightspeed, for which you'd need to have run a lot of fusion for a darned long time to get the power to do t
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know what you mean by "mass amplification". If something is accelerating, you get pressure and that's what matters.
Oh. Sorry: I thought you were talking about relativistic mass amplification.
You don't get pressure from acceleration. You get force. The pressure comes from the weight of the 432,690 mile deep column of mostly-hydrogen plasma above the reaction area in the sun's core, in the gravitational field that's 28 gs near the top (though less as you go down).
You could a similar pressure by ac
I wonder if it could do aneutronic fusion. (Score:2)
So the device is apparently a modified knight trap, in which deuterium ions achieve long-term elliptical orbits in the vicinity of a central wire or spindle-shaped electrode at about -600,000 V and in which they exhibit self-organized oscillatory bunching behavior.
I wonder if this can simultaneously confine two different elements with sufficient collisions between them to achieve useful rates of aneutronic fusion?
If the orbits of protons and boron 11 didn't have enough intersection, deuterons and boron 10 o
I say, nah. (Score:2)
Now just 20 years away (Score:2)
"I should be able to reduce this paper to practice in five years!" --Every over-optimistic fusion researcher ever.
I suppose the good news is that with this new technology, workable fusion power is now only 20 years away. That's a lot better than it was back in 1960 when it was (checks notes) a whole 20 years away.
Don't get me wrong, I'd *love* to see large-scale fusion power, and I'm confident that we'll figure it out some day. I just don't think that something that's still at the academic paper stage
Re: (Score:2)
Wow, what a new insight you have! /s
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
logistically it's easier to collect all the things while on Earth than to find the right combination of asteroids close enough together with the materials you need. We'll eventually hit a point where reaching out for materials beyond our own gravity well makes sense, but that's not happening in my lifetime.
Re:Scam alert (Score:5, Informative)
And no, fusion at that size is not possible and sending it to space is even more unpossible.
Fusion at that size is entirely possible. People build fusion reactors that size all the time. Sometimes the people building them are children. What has not been done before (and I'm not going to make any claims about whether it's possible or not) is a fusion reactor that size that puts out more power than it requires to run.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe they have (or think they have) figured out how to make a compact fusion drive? That would be more plausible, albeit still generally suspect. It lacks the need to generate electricity, and also the need to maintain containment in one direction which might conceivably make it easier.
Or it might just all be grade-A bullshit from beginning to end.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe they have (or think they have) figured out how to make a compact fusion drive? That would be more plausible, albeit still generally suspect. It lacks the need to generate electricity, and also the need to maintain containment in one direction which might conceivably make it easier.
I'm not sure about a drive, but clearly they do think that they can manage compact fusion power. Odds are that they can't. NASA does sometimes fund pie in the sky moonshot stuff like this just in case. In any case, the poster I replied to was only talking about a fusion reactor at that size, no qualifications about it being able to generate power, etc. So, in that respect they were clearly wrong since tabletop fusion is easy and is achieved all the time with fusors. In fact, it's believed that it may be pos
Nuclear Magnum Pistol Shrimp (Score:2)
Also, the sonoluminescence produced by pistol shrimp is right on the edge of what's required to produce fusion, so although a pistol shrimp in a tank might not be enough, it might be possible to build a powered up version of a pistol shrimps claws that can produce fusion.
Wouldn't it be a scream if the reason pistol shrimp are "right on the edge" is that just scaling it up works fine - but pistol shrimp that big are at a selective disadvantage due to damage from mild neutron irradiation, so the shrimps evolv
Re: (Score:2)
Which would also be why we don't see magnum pistol shrimp with nuclear-fusion boosted claw blasts shooting down anything tasty and feasting on the remains as an apex ocean predator. (Take THAT, laser sharks!)
That would be amazingly cool. Not that great for divers, but still pretty cool.
I don't think the radiation would be that much of a problem for a short-lived animal though. So it's probably more a matter of the pistol shrimp's claws already being a super-effective (and still super-cool even without fusion) weapon. Making it much more powerful probably runs the risk of the shrimp killing itself with its own weapon. It could just evolve to get tougher I suppose, but that would put it in an evolutionary arms ra
Re: (Score:2)
Sounds like there's a sci-fi story in this.
Re: (Score:2)
A fusion reactor, even a pretty inefficient one, would make a terrific spacecraft drive if you could reflect, harvest or maybe even just absorb enough neutrons. It could be worth it to just put an ordinary fusor on a satellite with some neutron shielding on one end.
The ISP of a fusion neutron is enormous.
Re: (Score:2)
Incorrect. This is not possible at that size for the description. It is a scam. You guys keep falling for this shit. I used to argue with doofuses about emdrive here. Now I do not even bother. I just tell you that you areinvorrect abd stupid and move on.
Reread my post and read the post I replied to. I was very, very clear that current fusors were not capable of producing more power than they use and also that I was making no statement on whether a breakeven or greater-than breakeven sustained reaction is possible at that size. The poster I replied to, meanwhile, did not properly distinguish between creating fusion at that size and viable power generation. They only said "... fusion at that size is not possible..." That required a correction.
Re: (Score:2)
He probably read just your first sentence and blew a gasket.
Re: Scam alert (Score:3)
Re: Scam alert (Score:2)
Tragic
Re: Scam alert (Score:2)
Look, a fusor is not a fusion reactor. They are not the same thing, and the guy was probably responding to the fact that slashdotters seem obsessed with the farnsworth fusor whenever the topic of fusion comes up. Given that a fusor absolutely not, by definition, a fusion reactor means that you will probably get some legitimate physicists angry at you if you keep using a fusor as an example of a fusion reactor. They are totally different devices by definition.
Re: (Score:2)
That must be a fun definition you've got in your head.
Re: (Score:2)
A fusor is absolutely a nuclear reactor. I'm not quite sure what confusion of ideas you have that would lead you to believe it is not. No legitimate physicist is going to get angry about calling it a reactor. They are not totally different device by definition, unless you're cherry picking definitions specifically to get the result you want. Would you care to share which definitions you're using and where they came from to reach this conclusion?
Re: (Score:2)
It absolutely is possible. Desktop Farnsworth Fusors have been in use since the 1930s. They're a perennial favorite because you can make them on a benchtop with a few $100 worth of equipment, and get within 80-90% of breakeven with just a bit of fine-tuning.
Unfortunately all they're really good for so far is easy neutron sources - nobody has ever managed to push it that last little bit to to breakeven. However, the fact that such a simple reactor can get so close to the finish line inspires a steady stre
Re: (Score:2)
You need to do a bit of googling before you post. Fusion is not difficult to achieve. As the post you replied to stated, children can, and have, done it for science fair projects.
Re: (Score:2)
Hydrogen Fusion at that size is actually advanced high school science fair grade stuff, the getting to zero net energy or better is the challenging part.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Since solar is so plentiful and easily scaled for orbital use, there is no excuse for investing the time and energy for a technology which has never worked on Earth and which has now been "30 years away" for the last 50 years.
Re: (Score:2)
I always see people making this same claim, it however misses a huge part of the fusion scientist's claims, which was the most important part of the statement. I guess it is just easier to deride the scientists that said that, "if you invest $x, fusion will be 30 years out" rather than the politicians that heard "if you invest $y (where y is less than x/2), fusion will never happen" and decided that was a good funding level to maintain.
https://images.app.goo.gl/ePxN... [app.goo.gl]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You do realize that Earth satellites--the low earth orbit ones, at least--go into the Earth's shadow for about half of each orbit. And when you get out towards Jupiter, that sunlight is getting awfully diffuse.
The real headline is a new reactor design. (Score:5, Interesting)
Ignore the spacey clickbait, the meat is in the new reactor design that they claim promises to generate useful power.
My impression is that it's a new variation on the ever enticing classic Farnsworth Fusor, with a big slice of the "secret sauce" to this one being that instead of a single grid electrode in the center, they're using series of nested electrodes with a voltage gradient across them shaped to act as "ion beam lenses" to dramatically increase the number of times ions could recirculate before colliding with the grid, potentially by several orders of magnitude (those losses being the the reason that fusors never quite reach breakeven.). And cause the majority of collisions to be with relatively low-voltage electrodes, significantly reducing the associated energy losses.
Fusors do have an unfortunate reputation for sending people on wild goose chases, they just get so *close* to breakeven (90+% without much effort) with such simple hardware, there must be a way to tech it up a bit to make them cross that line into being useful, right? Maybe McGuire is finally the one to crack the nut - it's certainly an intriguing idea. But I also saw a line about how it may initially be nothing more than a much more compact and efficient neutron source - which seems like a pretty low bar to aim for.
Still, it sounds like they've attracted some competent attention. And funding. I certainly find the idea of an electrode-lens to be far more elegant than the complex electromagnetic guidance/confinement systems the Polywell folks were working on before they went silent. Probably massively cheaper too. So here's hoping this is the one.
Re: (Score:3)
> My impression is that it's a new variation on the ever enticing classic Farnsworth Fusor,
Such designs have never worked. _Never_. They leak. Stretching an array of nested electrodes to guide plasma into efficient fusion seems extraordinarily unlikely with the overlapping fields of the arrays and the moving, thermally randomized movement of the ions in the plasma. Saying "we'll just use more electrodes" does not mean effectively or efficiently combining them to create a good focus to generate fusion, an
How it works (Score:2)
Oh? Can you point me at other multi-electrode designs? I'd love to compare and contrast, but I can't find any with the obvious (to me) search terms.
That's why I said "ever enticing". It's *so* close, and yet despite almost a hundred years of continuously luring clever minds being to its altar, nobody has made more than marginal improvements.
This sounds like it might be a contender though. Sounds like he figured out something that, at least in simulations, actually made a huge difference to the ion re-ci
Re: (Score:2)
DAMNED good comment! Salut!
Re: (Score:2)
If their design would work, it would be trivial to build one on Earth to power a laptop, to prove that it works.
I doubt they could do that though. Farnsworth designs aren't terribly expensive to build, you could build one in your garage, so wouldn't anyone be able to build this if it was so simple?
https://fusor.net/board/viewto... [fusor.net]
Re: (Score:2)
>wouldn't anyone be able to build this if it was so simple?
It certainly sounds like it - from an engineering perspective it's one of the simplest variations on a basic fusor that I've heard of.
The real question is not "Could anyone do it?", it's "Has anyone tried?" Many of the powerful inventions in human history aren't complicated so much as they're clever. Look at all the crazy can-opening designs that were widely popular before the simple pop-top was invented and made them all almost completely obso
Re: (Score:3)
Fusion propulsion isn't for producing electricity. It's for producing really fast exhaust. For that purpose it's not as important to be efficient since you can make up any shortfall from things like solar panels.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeap, and those ridiculous heavier-than-air flying machines will never work, either. Been trying since the days of Icarus. Put your money on balloons, the Montgolfier brothers showed how that works; and maybe dirigibles, too, if they can work out some of the flaws.
Re: (Score:3)
Fission is easier from an engineering point of view, but much harder politically.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, I hope you are right regarding the change of attitude towards fission. We still need to keep our foot on the pedal as far as ITER goes though.
They don't claim to have a working fusion reactor (Score:3)
See, if this startup had an actual working fusion reactor, compact and generating net energy, the whole launch into space thing would not be on the map, at all.
They don't claim to have a working fusion reactor. They claim to have modeling and tests with tweaked off-the-shelf components that have made a few neutrons and looks like a design based on it might make net power, and need a few million to build and tune a purpose-built apparatus to see if it does.
If it does, its characteristics would make it just
Re: (Score:2)
Lockheed's Skunkworks announced in 2014 they were a couple of years from practical fusion in a device the size of a refrigerator. They're "still working on it" too.
Re: (Score:2)
I seem to recall that when Musk announced that his team was going to produce re-usable boosters, the industry called him nuts. Now Lockheed may fail to produce their Mr. Fusion, but that doesn't *necessarily* mean that someone else won't.