Fusion Rocket Engines, SETI and Science: Seriously

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Clockwise from upper right, 'Towards thermonuclear rocket propulsion', Gerald W. Englert, Lewis Research Centre, US National Aeronautics and Space Administration, reprinted from 'New Scientist' (1963); Fusion Rocket Concepts, NASA Technical Memorandum (1971), Fusion reactions and matter–antimatter annihilation for space propulsion', Claude Deutsch, Naeem A. Tahir, Cambridge University Press (2006); ESA's Nuclear fusion space propulsion (2021).

Nerd alert!

This week I used words like deuterium and magnetohydrodynamics.

And I may have gone into more detail that necessary about why we didn’t have fusion power generators in the 1960s.

A British company's plans for test-firing a fusion rocket engine got my attention last week. I'd planned on writing about it then, but a dental procedure and household matters got in the way.

So I researched and made more notes over the weekend, and when my town's power came back online late Monday afternoon: the notes weren't there any more. That's something I may talk about, sometime next week.

Anyway, I re-researched, got stuck and/or distracted a couple times — I'll talk about tralphium and mindsets in a bit — and ended up with this post.

Which, as it turned out, included a bit about NASA's interest in UAPs and the serious search for extraterrestrial intelligence. More at A Catholic Citizen in America.

(Fusion power research from Ivy Mike to the Princeton field-reversed configuration and Pulsar Fusion Direct Fusion Drive, or DFD. Serious SETI, speculation.)

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