Fusion Rocket Engines, SETI and Science: Seriously

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.

• Sunshine, Energy and Mass: Fusion Basics
  • Thermonuclear Weapons, History and Ideas: Very Briefly
  • Getting Back to Fusion Basics
  • Tralphium?! — or — Gamow, “New Genesis”, God and Chesterton
    • “His Gaze Spans All the Ages…”
• Plasma, Magnetohydrodynamics and My Research Roadblock
  • Science. Electromagnets. Levitating Light Bulbs!
  • Mindsets, Reasonable and Otherwise — or — Angst and Attitudes
    • Learning the Right Lessons: Eventually
  • Doing It With (Magnetic) Mirrors
• FUSION ROCKETS TO THE STARS! (eventually)
  • Comparing Princeton’s FRC System and Pulsar Fusion’s DFD
• UFOs, UAPs and NASA
• SETI, NASA, Technosignatures and a Flight of Fancy
  • Wildly Improbable, But Not Impossible

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.)