A.I. Sparks Nuclear Fusion Rocket Breakthrough
UK aerospace company Pulsar Fusion has started constructing the largest
practical nuclear fusion rocket engine ever built.
The 8-metre fusion chamber is being assembled in Bletchley, England and
when fired in 2027, will temporarily become the hottest place in the
solar system creating exhaust speeds of over 500,000 MPH.
Researchers at Pulsar Fusion hope to reach several hundred- million
degrees when the final plasma shot is fired in the chamber, creating
temperatures hotter than the Sun.
Dr James Lambert, CFO of Pulsar Fusion said: “The difficulty is
learning how to hold and confine the super-hot plasma within an
electromagnetic field.
“The plasma behaves like a weather system in terms of being incredibly
hard to predict using conventional techniques.
“Scientists have not been able to control the turbulent plasma as it
is heated to hundreds of millions of degrees and the reaction simply
stops.
“This unpredictability is attributed to the science Magneto-Hydro
Dynamics (MHD) and Gyrokinetics, the state of the plasma is changing all
the time.
“Scientists can get to fusion temperatures, as recently demonstrated
at the Lawrence Livermore laboratory in 2022, and this will be achieved
again more often going forward, but small improvements can dramatically
improve the results in our favour.”
Crucially, very recent advances in machine learning techniques may have
changed the playing field in favour of scientists.
Pulsar have teamed up with Princeton Satellite Systems [1] to take the
data from the World record holding PFRC-2 [2] reactor, feed it into
supercomputer simulations to better predict how super-hot plasma behaves
under electromagnetic confinement and thus, guide and improve the design
of the rocket engine prototype.
Pulsar’s CEO Richard Dinan said “Our current satellite engines we
make today at Pulsar, produce up to 25 miles per second in exhaust
speeds. We hope to achieve over 10 times that with fusion.
“If the Pulsar rocket test can achieve fusion temperatures at its
demonstration to Aerospace partners in 2027, then the technology has the
potential to half mission times to Mars, reduce flight time to Saturn
from 8 years to 2 and ultimately empower humanity to leave our solar
system.
“We will be keeping our existing partners up to date at every step
even as we begin early firings in 2025, we will be able to know if we
are on the right track.
“Pulsar would then need to conduct a test firing in orbit. To the
fusion community, AI truly does have the potential to allow us to
achieve engines capable of interstellar space travel.”
