The rules of space travel could change within the next decade if current experiments succeed in converting nuclear fusion from a future energy source into a spacecraft engine, which could theoretically reach speeds many times greater than current vehicles.
Hot Topics
About half of Libyans drink contaminated water What is the scientific reason?
Mauritania's blue treasure is in danger Will the map of fish in the Atlantic be redrawn?
The Citrus Secret Everyone's Talking About: Burn More, Crave Less & Feel Great Naturally
British company Pulsar Fusion, Princeton University and US company Helicity Space are working on different fusion propulsion technologies, with the former hoping to test its engine in orbit in 2027. Helicity Space CEO and co-founder Stefan Lintner said that if development continues at the current pace, "everything we know about space travel will change within a decade."
The appeal of the idea in space lies in the possibility of using the plasma produced by fusion directly to generate continuous thrust. Unlike chemical rockets whose engines operate for limited periods, a fusion engine could propel a spacecraft for months, gradually accumulating speed to hundreds or even thousands of kilometers per second, theoretically.
But achieving this requires a small reactor that can be launched into space, suitable fuel, powerful magnets to control the plasma, and extremely high temperatures. University of Washington aerospace engineering professor Bovana Srinivasan explained that pushing fusion is "more difficult in some ways and easier in others" than producing fusion energy on Earth.
Plasma inside an engine: the first step towards testing
Pulsar Fusion achieved a significant milestone last March when one of Sunbird's engines produced plasma for the first time, briefly converting krypton gas into plasma and confining it using an electromagnetic field.
The company's founder and CEO, Richard Dinan, said the experiment proved it was possible to keep the plasma in the desired position, but the next challenge is heating it to the temperatures required for fusion. The company plans to fuse deuterium and helium -3 and use the resulting energy to heat helium-4 and eject it to generate thrust.
The company envisions vehicles reaching speeds of approximately 529,000 kilometers per hour, nearly 10 times the speed of the current Voyager-1, which could reduce the time of a Mars journey compared to a journey that takes about 9 months using chemical propulsion.
At Princeton University, a physics group has been working on a similar concept for more than 20 years, and the team's model has reached a plasma temperature of about 10 million degrees Celsius. However, the fusion of deuterium and helium-3 needs to approach one billion degrees Celsius, so a practical system could become possible within 10-20 years if sufficient funding is available.
The road to the stars is still full of obstacles.
Helicity Space, for its part, is developing a propulsion system that uses plasma pulses instead of continuous fusion. It hopes to launch a prototype within about three years and, by the 2030s, achieve a propulsion system that produces more fusion energy than it consumes. If such technologies succeed, distant targets in the solar system could become more accessible.
A recent study, for example, showed that a vehicle with direct fusion propulsion could reach the distant dwarf planet Sedna in about 10 years instead of needing decades with traditional propulsion.
Tags:
science