11 thoughts on “Fusion”

  2. Achieving fusion is like trying to accelerate to light speed using conventional means. You get incrementally less closer the closer you get.

    2. “You get incrementally less closer the closer you get.”

      Something similar used to be said about heavier-than-air-craft. They were likewise held to be “impossible” until someone did it. How incrementally less closer to fusion does a Hydrogen bomb get? Wonder how close to fusion that the Tsar bomb got?

      1. How incrementally less closer to fusion does a Hydrogen bomb get? Wonder how close to fusion that the Tsar bomb got?

        Neither of these devices are anywhere close to a controlled fusion reactor. None of these devices rely on maintaining a plasma under thermal equilibrium to extract the energy of a fusion reaction that is not in runaway. In fact the neutron path in a fusion ‘reactor’ is much more free than in a ‘hydrogen’ bomb. The fusion neutrons in a bomb are used to fission the tamper, which is where the bulk of the energy release comes from. We’ve had the fusion bomb since the Ivy Mike shot on Nov 1, 1952. Seems like if any of this technology could have been leveraged for controlled fusion, we’d have surely had it by now.

  3. I afraid of the fusion (for space propulsion) designs I have heard of I like best John Slough’s
    “The Fusion Driven Rocket: Nuclear Propulsion through Direct Conversion of Fusion Energy”

    http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/realdesignsfusion.php#id–Magneto_Inertial_Fusion_Drive_Rocket

    https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/2012_phaseII_fellows_slough.html

    Pretty impressive numbers; 5000 SI with 49K m/s exhaust velocity. Total system weighs about 130MT just over the amount of just one Starship flight to LEO amount of 100MT.

  4. In half a decade.

    Well, we’ve gone from being being perpetually 20 years away to 5, so, progress?

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