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Pastimes : Space -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (1522)	9/18/2009 9:41:13 PM
From: D. Long	Respond to of 3872

But Emrich notes that to make a fusion-powered spaceship light enough to reach Mars in two weeks, propulsion experts will need a breakthrough in materials science Or a breakthrough in confinement. I like the prospects of Brussard's Polywell device. The Navy has a lock on the funding for this project, so any results will be embargoed for more than a decade. en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The polywell is a plasma confinement concept that combines elements of inertial electrostatic confinement and magnetic confinement fusion, intended ultimately to produce fusion power. The name polywell is a portmanteau of "polyhedron" and "potential well." The polywell consists of electromagnet coils arranged in a polyhedral configuration and positively charged to between several 10s and low 100s of kilovolts. This charged magnetic polyhedron is called a MaGrid. Electrons are introduced outside the "quasi-spherical" MaGrid and are accelerated into the MaGrid due to the electric field. Within the MaGrid, magnetic fields confine most of the electrons and those that escape are retained by the electric field. This configuration traps the electrons in the middle of the device focusing them near the center which produces a virtual cathode (negative electric potential). The virtual cathode is used to accelerate and confine the ions to be fused which, except for minimal losses, never reach the physical structure of the MaGrid. It was developed by Robert Bussard under a US Navy research contract as an improvement of the Farnsworth-Hirsch fusor.