British firm building nuclear fusion rocket engine that will hotter than The Sun
A British aerospace company is building a nuclear fusion-based rocket engine that could exceed temperatures on the Sun.
Pulsar Fusion, situated in Bletchley, England, state the technology that will be used in its eight-metre rocket has the potential to allow humans to boldly go into space at speeds of up to 500,000 miles per hour.
The company asserts that upon its launch in 2027, the fusion chamber will temporarily become the hottest location within the solar system. The researchers aim to achieve temperatures of several hundred million degrees during the final plasma shot in the chamber, surpassing the heat of the Sun.
Pulsar anticipates that this technology holds the potential to halve the duration of a mission to Mars and reduce the flight time to Saturn from eight years to two.
Dr. James Lambert, the Chief Financial Officer of Pulsar, remarked, "The challenge lies in learning how to confine and contain the super-hot plasma within an electromagnetic field The plasma exhibits weather-like characteristics, making it extraordinarily difficult to predict using conventional methods. Scientists have struggled to control the turbulent plasma as it reaches temperatures in the hundreds of millions of degrees, causing the reaction to abruptly cease.
"While scientists have managed to attain fusion temperatures, as recently demonstrated at the Lawrence Livermore laboratory in 2022, and are likely to replicate this achievement more frequently in the future, even slight improvements can yield significant benefits for us."
The firm hopes to commence preliminary firings in 2025, and then will need to conduct a test firing while in orbit.
Credit: Pulsar Fusion/Cover Images
