Took me a little bit this is the article that’s being referenced. It’s late so I’ll look at this tomorrow. First impression is 2.6uW/cm2 is surprisingly high given that a human body doesn’t produce that much energy at rest.
The headline’s a bit misleading. The drive is a plasma thruster, and the company found that by adding Boronated water to the exhaust the plasma would fuse with some of the boron creating a kind of afterburner effect, not a sustained fusion reaction. It’s kind of interesting as a way to boost the performance of the plasma thruster, but not “OMG it’s a Fusion Drive!!!” interesting.
Yeah, that’s the fault of the article author. The actual press release uses “fusion-enhanced” which is a lot more honest.
To be fair, they’re quoting a 50% increase in thrust so it’s not completely clickbait to say “fusion powered” but it definitely does give the wrong picture.
Wasn’t there an rocket concept like that from the 70’s, using the freed electrons for containement or something? I saw it once on Wikipedia and then never found it again.
There has been some fusor research going on for decades. The issue that killed that direction of fusion research was ultimately that the electrons do not behave as the initial simple models suggested and in the real world the power loss from the fast electrons is just too big for any reasonably sized device to allow for self sustaining fusion.
Basically this. Look at all the big fusion reactor projects - they’ve been going for decades and JUST NOW hit a very miniscule amount of net output within the past several months.
This new plane is a hypersonic weapon delivery drone, barely related to the SR-71 aside from the speed it can travel.
As to the sixty years thing, satellites made spyplanes nearly entirely obsolete and traditional aircraft with stealth technology covered the remaining cases well enough that there wasn’t a need for more speed. Research went into making missiles better instead, and this is designed to be a launch platform for those missiles.
Then why do we still operate the U2? SR-71 was operated all the way until 1999. Hubble was launched in 1990 so the large mirrors for spy telescopes had to have been in use well before that.
Meh plasma could in theory be a very good radar absorber. Plasma stealth isn’t just buzzwords necessarily. A myth possibly.
Whether they got it working in practice is dubious though, it’s an extremely hard engineering challenge. Interesting if true, unlikely given it’s being announced.
Light phasing is already concerned with quantum effects so without seeing the actual claim I mean… Anyone could basically claim that lol.
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