Interplanetary Nuclear Fusion Rockets, A Mini-Documentary

[Music] hello and welcome to Astra necks today's topic is interplanetary fusion rockets when you subscribe be sure to click on the belt so that you're notified every time we upload a new video if you want to support us on patreon one dollar adds up quickly thank you in the 1940s it was thought that mankind would move out into and conquer space commercializing it eventually leading to routine flights around the solar system and even beyond science fiction of the day portrayed such a grand and inspiring future from Buck Rogers to Isaac Asimov scholastic Empire and foundation novels to the German science fiction series Perry wrote down stories that the creators of Star Trek and Star Wars grow up with and were inspired by this future seemed to begin humans walked on Luna our Moon and there was even talk about more ambitious missions from colonizing Mars to sending missions beyond the solar system but then it all petered out interest waned and funding was reduced or worse cut now decades have come and gone and finally after all these years interest and advances into space are once more gaining momentum so how might we turn the current resurgence of interest in space travel into a future like that imagined by early science fiction writers well currently we only really have one option and that is atomic rockets while chemical rockets have proven to be very effective they will always be inefficient ultimately they can only take us so far while I on if plasma drives have the thrust of basically your breath atomic therefore is the only way to go if we want a truly spacefaring future many if not most of these early science fiction stories and rocket ships powered by atomic energy as the Star Trek and Star Wars that we all know and love were inspired by these stories of atomic rockets if we want a future anything like these loved works of fiction excluding faster-than-light for a moment we will need atomic propulsion however we need not use dangerous unstable nuclear fission to power the new atomic rocket ships rather we can use fusion but wait someone might say fusion is impractical or even fusion is impossible by the end of this mini documentary we will have demonstrated how fusion is not only practical but that it is happening now part 1 the first fusion rocket the Orion the Orion or as winchell Chun creator of atomic rockets website calls it old boom boom [Music] the Orion aka old boom boom simply uses unconfined nuclear explosion to propel itself the tungsten coated steel pusher plate can withstand the explosion but is worn away over time requiring occasional replacement among the advantages of this kind of propulsion is the ability to fly anywhere in the Solar System closer than the Kuiper belt in weeks or a few months at most and to do it without needing to build out of aluminum foil and most interestingly we actually have the technology to build this today in fact we did back in the 1950s however and you could say that the drive has some significant disadvantages to put it mildly for starters the acceleration comes in massive well explosive bursts that require the use of shock absorbers to smooth out into something survivable by both crew and the equipment the intense neutron radiation of each blast will render anything nearby from the craft structure to other spacecraft to asteroids to the inevitable dust cloud if you're crazy enough to try for a surface liftoff all will become intensely radioactive this unfortunately means that you cannot use the Orion for what it is best suited for carrying massive payloads into orbit okay that's the Orion but what else is on the table part two rubber zubrin's nuclear saltwater rocket well not actually a fusion rocket itself this design has a performance similar to that of a fusion rocket a nuclear saltwater rocket uses uranium salts dissolved in water as its fuel this uranium salt water is simply injected into a reaction chamber where it then goes critical and detonates so in this way a nuclear salt water rocket flies on a continuous nuclear explosion and yet this drive is even more potent than the Orion possessing a much greater maximum change in velocity Delta V and accelerating steadily instead of a series of hammer blows that require the use of shock absorbers to smooth out into something survivable to say nothing of comfortability of course lengthy Orion the drive spews out massive quantities of neutron radiation and were still intense radioactive still fissioning uranium needless to say that such a drive could never be used anywhere near a planet you cared about so let's move on part three and Orion improvement mini mag Orion to get around the problem of needing massive shock absorbers to avoid the spacecraft from being destroyed by nuclear explosions a team of scientists decided to redesign the Orion first off they made each explosion much much smaller giving the drive a scalability the original Orion lacked secondly they ditched the self-contained bombs altogether using instead pellets triggered externally by magnetic fields powered by an external power source thirdly they replace the Orion's flat ablative pusher plate with a magnetic nozzle they needed the magnetic fields anyway so why not about 1% of the energy of each pulse is used to recharge the craft capacitor banks for the next pulse harvested by a part of the magnetic nozzle unfortunately owing to the massive electrical currents required the craft required gigantic radiators to keep the coils for melting or worse vaporizing additionally this drive still produces large quantities of radioactivity inducing neutron radiation that said as a further refinement we might use an ax tronic fusion fuels instead of fission triggered fusion keep that in mind we'll come back to it for now we'll discuss the next design part for a pure fusion design project Daedalus beginning in the 1960s dr. winterberg showed that thermal nucular micro explosions concepts with a superconducting magnetic reflector might lead to a good space propulsion system this idea was used by the British interplanetary society in their project Daedalus study a proposal to send a probe to Bernards star from 1973 to 1978 unlike the Orion the dead list does not use fission or fission triggered fusion but rather it uses pure fusion pacifically the starship would use deuterium helium-3 fusion ignited by powerful electron beams and directed by a magnetic nozzle among the advantages over the Orion is that the Daedalus does not require any radioactive fission fuel nor a functional nuclear device and nor does the Daedalus produce as much neutron radiation as the Orion however to fuel it would require collecting extremely rare helium-3 which despite popular opinion is not so much common on the moon merely easy to access while the size and design is acceptable to a degree for a starship if we want something that can fly around the solar system and be used potentially from planetary surfaces we need something more robust and compact perhaps the Daedalus could be scaled down somewhat to be used as a single stage to anywhere rapid interplanetary spaceship continuing onward to the next design part five Penn State's I can to antimatter catalyzed micro fission / fusion rather than using unconfined atomic explosions or fission fusion triggered by super strong magnetic fields or even electron beams the I can to uses antimatter to catalyze a micro fission reaction which in turn triggers a fusion reaction the late dr. Robert L forward former senior scientists at Hughes Research Laboratories and science fiction writer pointed out that the current sources of antimatter particle colliders were designed by scientists to do science experiments generating antimatter only as a by-product he goes on to state that if redesigned by engineers specifically as antimatter factories dedicated colliders could produce antimatter efficiently enough that it could become commercially viable to use it for a wide variety of things even for launching into space that said antimatter might remain too expensive to use for electrical energy generation directly it would not however be too expensive to catalyze fusion the I can to would not use as much fissionable fuel as the Orion in fact as we will discuss shortly it is likely feasible to use antimatter to catalyze fusion directly by virtue of its relatively delicate design and still larger Neutron flux the I can to cannot liftoff from a planet's surface yet if another fusion fuel mixture were used and the fission triggered eliminated antimatter catalyzed fusion is very promising indeed moving forward part six a neutronic fusion proton boron fusion proton bore infusion is called nano tronic meaning that it produces no neutron radiation directly the negligible amount of neutron radiation that is produced comes from side reactions and accounts for only 2% of the total energy output of a proton boron fusion reaction as we speak multiple teams around the world are working on reactors using proton boron fusion recently a new cascade / avalanche chain reaction technique was developed and tested and shows the promise of a fusion reactor that is actually easier to build than fusion reactors using other reactions and designs the scientists involved say that it's just a matter of scaling up their existing design to something that can produce a net output keep in mind that so far other than small-scale proof-of-concept tests no reactors using proton boron fusion have been built and tested for the most part these reactors are theoretical the proof-of-concept models were only to test boron plasma and proton interactions and did not generate sustained fusion even if this new technique does not function as expected there are other methods to trigger the fusion reaction one is the Z pinch effect used by the mini mega Ryan perhaps this could be used in conjunction with the cascade effect then there is the MU on catalyze fusion where a heavy counterpart to the electron the muon replaces an electron in a hydrogen or deuterium atom drawing the new key light closer to one another easing the process of fusion generating the requisite Mulan's in sufficient quantities may become possible in easy if we can harness the next form of fusion part seven fusion around the corner ultra dense deuterium while proton boron fusion might be called a neutron II it still produces a small quantity of neutrons however there is a form of fusion that does not produce any neutrons ultra dense deuterium this is a newly discovered form of metallic deuterium called Rydberg matter that is ultra dense deuterium is a deuterium based Rydberg matter normally metallic hydrogen is only formed under extreme pressures but in the case of Rydberg matter something different occurs the electron shells of the deuterium atoms are excited until they are enlarged to on the atomic scale gigantic disks rather than small spheres in a way Ryberg state atoms are akin to giant spiral galaxies while the atoms in normal state are akin to seroy deled warf galaxies in this state the deuterium can then undergo a phase transition whereby the deuterium disc can pack closer together parallel with the axis of the disc than normally occurs forming a new ultra dense state of matter in fact the density of ultra dense deuterium is 10 to the 28th power to ten to the twenty ninth power grams per cubic centimeter about a million times the density of frozen deuterium most interestingly the density is a hundred and 50 times the density of a typical fusion fuel pellet under peak laser compression this means that the massive quantities of energy are not required to compress the fusion fuel it is already a hundred and fifty times the needed since the pellet does not need to be compressed all sorts of hydrodynamic instabilities can be avoided all we need is a relatively modest laser al biet with a very quick pulse yet such a laser is well within the capability of the lasers already used in fusion experiments since the ignition energy is so low there is a chance that the ultra-dense deuterium fuel will spontaneously undergo fusion so fuel would need to be stored as normal deuterium and converted into ultra dense form only immediately before being used very interestingly rather than neutrons a fusion of ultra dense deuterium produces negative moons instead this means electrical energy can be harvested directly without the need for thermal to electrical conversion furthermore the muuns produced can be used to catalyze other forms of fusion some more energetic than ultra dense deuterium such as proton boron fusion most of the research on ultra dense deuterium has been carried out by a single scientific group at the University of Gothenburg Sweden led by dr. al homeland Rydberg matter is proven well known and researched it may in light of the nature of Rydberg matter be unsurprising that such a phase transition into ultra dense form of Rydberg matter is possible indeed as dr. winterberg the very same who conceived of the propulsion concept that became the Daedalus concludes on a purely theoretical grounds an ultra dense state of deuterium cannot be easily dismissed dr. winterberg also notes that dr. homeland has an established record of publications about Rydberg matter in the refered scientific literature homeland is by no means an amateur or even a bungler recently a two-man team in southern Utah McTaggart and Ben thrift have begun conducting experiments to independently confirm dr. Holm leads findings this is very exciting news as they appear to have already performed some experiments and reported success so perhaps the near future may hold something rather surprising until then we will have to wait and see whether this energy source is proven and unlocks the might of fusion and with it interplanetary and interstellar travel on that note let's discuss one more form of fusion returning to antimatter the I can too uses antimatter to catalyze micro fission which in turn triggers a fusion yet as we stated it may be possible to trigger a fusion reaction such as a proton boron fusion directly as for the required antimatter to quote and dr. Robert L forward in a study I carried out for the airforce rocket propulsion laboratory I showed that if an antiproton factory were designed properly by engineers instead of by scientists with limited budgets and in a hurry to win a nobel prize the present energy efficiency electrical energy in compared to antimatter annihilation energy out could be raised from a part in 60 million to a part in 10,000 or 0.01% while at the same time the cost of building the factory could be substantially lowered compared to the cost of the high precision scientific machines from these studies I estimate the cost of the antimatter at 10 million dollars per milligram this may sound like a lot but at 10 million dollars per milligram antimatter is already cost-effective for space propulsion and power at the present in 1995 subsidized cost of space shuttle for launch it cost about five million dollars to put a ton of anything into low-earth orbit since a milligram of antimatter produces the same amount of energy of 20 tons of the most energetic chemical fuel available then a milligram of antimatter costing 10 million dollars would be a more cost-effective fuel in space than 20 tons of chemical fuel costing ten times as much antimatter is no longer science fiction it is real and is being made daily for scientific purposes furthermore there exists another antimatter source that could revolutionize space travel and would definitely turn space travel into a commercial enterprise however we will come back to this in a future video so you see while this is far from a comprehensive list Fusion is no longer a distant dream but a future reality that is fast approaching very fast indeed as a final note let's suppose that a new fusion engine was developed that is capable of taking off from the ground without spraying out deadly neutron radiation if SpaceX is bfr were redesigned to utilize such engines perhaps a manned Mars mission could be achieved sooner as always thanks for watching subscribe and if you want to support us on patreon please do so thank you until next time keep wondering about space [Music] [Music] you you

Channel: AsteronX

Views: 145,091

Rating: 4.8333335 out of 5

Keywords: Fusion Rockets, Robert Zubrin’s Nuclear Saltwater Rocket, Mini-Mag Orion, Project Daedalus, Aneutronic Fusion: Proton-Boron Fusion, Ultra-Dense Deuterium, Dr. L. Holmlid, Dr. Winterberg, Mike Taggett, Antimatter-Catalysed Fusion, Dr. Robert L. Forward, SpaceX’s BFR, Interplanetary space travel, Manned mission to Mars, Atomic, Nuclear, Rockets, Orion, AsteronX, Ben Thrift, Fusion, starships, Perry Rhodan, Issac Asimov, Buck Rogers, ICAN II

Id: NwS_aHfE6Es

Length: 24min 2sec (1442 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 03 2018