🚀 Fusion-powered spacecraft can cut travel time to Mars in half

• British company Pulsar Fusion is developing Sunbird, a fusion-powered spacecraft that can reach speeds up to 805,000 kilometers per hour.
• Nuclear fusion in space may be easier to achieve than on Earth, as vacuum is a more natural environment for the fusion process.
• The Sunbird system could deliver 2000 kg of cargo to Mars in less than six months and make interplanetary missions more time-efficient.

British company plans fusion propulsion in space

Creating nuclear fusion on Earth has long been a challenge for researchers worldwide. Now British company Pulsar Fusion is taking a different approach - they're moving the technology to space. With funding from the UK Space Agency, the company has presented Sunbird, a concept for a spacecraft that uses nuclear fusion for propulsion.

"It's very unnatural to do fusion on Earth," says Richard Dinan, founder and CEO of Pulsar to CNN. "Fusion doesn't want to work in an atmosphere. Space is a far more logical, sensible place to do fusion, because that's where it naturally wants to happen."

The Sunbird concept is based on spacecraft docking with fusion-powered units that then accelerate them to speeds up to 805,000 kilometers per hour - faster than NASA's Parker Solar Probe which reached 692,000 kilometers per hour, the fastest vehicle humans have built to date.

Testing and development plan

Some components will be tested in orbit this year. "They're basically circuit boards that go up to be tested, to make sure they work. Not very exciting because there's no fusion, but we have to do it," explains Dinan.

According to plans, a smaller part of Sunbird will be sent up in 2027 to verify that the physics works as calculated. This will be the company's first orbital demonstration, where they hope to achieve fusion in space - and be the first to succeed in doing so.

The prototype will cost approximately 70 million dollars. A fully functional Sunbird system is expected to be ready four to five years later, provided that necessary funding is secured.

Advantages of fusion in space

Unlike fusion reactors on Earth, which must produce more energy than they consume, a space fusion engine can be valuable even if inefficient. The goal is not to generate electricity but to create propulsion.

The Sunbird system would use only grams of fuel, primarily an expensive isotope called helium-3, to create protons that become a "nuclear exhaust" for propulsion.

The system could deliver up to 2000 kilograms of cargo to Mars in less than six months, send probes to Jupiter or Saturn in two to four years, and enable a round-trip journey to a nearby asteroid in one to two years instead of three.

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