And a wee bit o' whiskey.

This is coming from a state that legalized weed this past fall.  Who wants to bet this is just the product of a scientist stoned for the first time?

ShawnDoc: This is coming from a state that legalized weed this past fall.  Who wants to bet this is just the product of a scientist stoned for the first time?

Hydrogen fusion is doable.  There's a fusion plant being built in France.  And fusion is the only realistic way to ever explore the solar system with manned flight.

The world has had fusion for decades. It's called the H-bomb. Basically you surround the fusion materials with a thick chocolaty coating of regular fission bombs and blow them to heck.

Readers of SF writers Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle are reminded (in The Mote in God's Eye, etc.) that it was even proposed long ago to propel space craft by exploding a-bombs behind them. You'd need a really good shield to protect space travelers from their engine of mass destruction, but in principle the bombs could drive the ship to substantial speeds.

You could even move an asteroid by exploding atom bombs on one side of the planetoid.

It seems to me that if you wanted a fusion-powered space craft, this simple and crude plan would suffice--you might not even need anything as difficult as bombs. A steady stream of ions driven to high speeds in a cyclotron and then aimed at a point behind the ship would be enough. The ship would have a massive shield to protect the payload and gas stores that would in some respects resemble a very robust solar power furnace. You'd basically only have to collect enough of the power generated to get the ship accelerated. This model would save you the trouble of containment and control. It would be a quasi-continuous H-bomb launch.

You might actually have some sort of structure to contain the H-gas, which could be ignited by beams of particles or super-powerful lasers fueled by traditional nuclear reactors.

Sophistication and safety features wouldn't be required in interplanetary or interstellar space, where you have lots of room and little resistance to motion until you reach high speeds.

Compared to the problem of building practical scaled-up fusion reactors on Earth, it's as simple as falling off a log.

Perhaps the power could be focused and beamed to Earth orbiting collectors which might turn it into power to make hydrogen fuel or microwave beams. Thus the same free-range "fusion bombs" could power space craft and ground or orbital stations at once, making them more efficient despite their crudeness.

brantgoose: Readers of SF writers Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle are reminded (in The Mote in God's Eye, etc.) that it was even proposed long ago to propel space craft by exploding a-bombs behind them. You'd need a really good shield to protect space travelers from their engine of mass destruction, but in principle the bombs could drive the ship to substantial speeds.

That wasn't Mote.  That was Footfall, when they build an Orion.

But yes, the Orion project was an old idea.  But it's also a fission, not fusion, engine.  They were talking about manned missions to Saturn in the 1960s with that program.

GAT_00: They were talking about manned missions to Saturn in the 1960s with that program.

It was a good idea, too. Except you'd need to stockpile 100s of nukes for each trip.

It's green!

Dang! 4 in just a month. Best $5 I ever spent.

The headline makes it sound like we're going to blow up Mars.

MARS biatchES.

Treygreen13: The headline makes it sound like we're going to blow up Mars.

MARS biatchES.

revenge on Marvin for his plots against earth

This is pretty cool. Other than the Orion project, it's the first viable "real world" fusion rocket that I've seen.

Where is the N-Cell in Ford Fusion?

GAT_00: ShawnDoc: This is coming from a state that legalized weed this past fall.  Who wants to bet this is just the product of a scientist stoned for the first time?

Hydrogen fusion is doable.  There's a fusion plant being built in France.  And fusion is the only realistic way to ever explore the solar system with manned flight.

Yeah, because when it blows up the planet, we will all be floating in space.

//Kidding

I actually really wonder if humans will ever develop any kind of technology that will get a human as far as Jupiter in our lifetime.  Probably not.  But being a science fiction nerd, and knowing that according to the movies, we should have been doing that readily for over 12 years by now, I really would love to see that happen.