Rocketstar Creates Nuclear Fusion to Indirectly Boost to Electric Space Propulsion

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RocketStar has announced the first successful demonstration of their nuclear fusion-enhanced pulsed plasma FireStar™ Drive. They have enhanced electric drive space propulsion.

Electric propulsion drives create small amounts of thrust but are significantly more fuel-efficient than conventional chemical rockets. Electric propulsion are ion and hall effect drives. They are like the tortoise to the chemical rocket hare. The electric drives keep thrusting for months or years while the chemical rockets have the fuel for a few minutes.

This type of fuel-to-thrust ratio is particularly important for vehicles that are intended to remain in orbit for long periods of time while also retaining the ability to maneuver when needed. Electric propulsion drives are also ideally suited for missions to the outer reaches of the solar system since they can combine the power collected from the sun with a small amount of propellant to travel vast distances.

RocketStar’s Foundation drive is one such electric propulsion technology that uses plain old water as its core propellant.

They were able to use the existing drive’s exhaust to create a nuclear fusion reaction by injecting Boron directly into the exhaust plume. Much like an afterburner injects raw fuel directly into the exhaust of a jet engine to offer short bursts of speed, the injection of Boron resulted in a dramatic increase in efficiency.

The fusion creates a high-energy carbon that immediately decays into three useful alpha particles, thereby breaking up the cloud of positive charge that exists in the exhaust of all-electric thrusters.

The fusion reaction does not increase the thrust by forcing blasts of fusion radiation out the back of the thruster. Instead, the alpha particles generated simply improve the existing thruster by reducing the “space charge effect” thereby increasing the operating efficiency of the Foundation drive.

“It’s all indirect, using a very specific type of fusion to sweep away garbage,” RocketStar executives told The Debrief.

Those improved propulsion results were later confirmed in Phase 2 of the system’s development at Georgia Tech’s High Power Electric Propulsion Laboratory (HPEPL) in Atlanta, Georgia. There, the drive not only created the telltale ionizing radiation of the fusion reaction but also improved the base unit’s thrust by 50%.

14 thoughts on “Rocketstar Creates Nuclear Fusion to Indirectly Boost to Electric Space Propulsion”

  1. It’s not even fusion for fusion’s sake, it’s just using alpha particles to fill the space charge for a conventional plasma electric thruster That’s why it’s only 1.5x performance over the basic plasma thruster.

  2. Whenever I read “boron” in a discussion around “fusion”, I now immediately translate an insertion of “a-neutronic” and its doppelganger “radioactive byproduct ‘free'” as well.

    Thusly inserted, then the usual reservation(s) about running “fusion experiments” here on Ball-o-Dirt (of having to deal with apparatus that is hopelessly contaminated with radioactive fission-and-fusion byproducts) is theoretically mitigated. And who knows, maybe the fusion bits produce an attractive amount of energy too. Arguably useful amounts. Certainly irrefutable amounts.

    Very good, right?

    The counter-side is that (it seems to this old goat) that a substantial fraction of fusion efforts are very much aimed at gathering delicious buckets of investment cash, to do stuff, to write papers, to give presentations at symposia, and of course ostensibly to revolutionize something or another that is hampered by conventionalism.

    Obviously, right?

    Thing is, this is also about the time my “skeptic meter” starts pegging. The poor lil’ needle gets such a workout. The scientist in me shakes his head, and rhetorically asks, “so, is this a thing, or is it fluff?” That is to me the point of even publishing op-ed pieces like Mr. Wang’s recap, above. To stimulate dispassionate critical thinking.

    So far, my take-away is “sounds modestly promising, needs substantial financial underwriting to scale thru another 3 or 4 generations of scaled up ground-experimentation and then a decent-sized space mission to ‘watch it run’ for a few years to see how all the components (inevitably) gradually degrade to uselessness.

    Which is not bad, as far as Goat’s Skeptical Leaning goes.

    So…

    • Have they published in scientific journals? What energy do they accelerate the protons in the water plasma exhaust?

  4. I wonder if there’s a possibility that there could be an energy generation version/application for this technology, for electricity? I’m only wondering because it’s fusion, but geared toward propulsion. Could it easily be altered for electric power?

    • It’s complete crap. Proton – Boron (p-11B) fusion needs over ONE BILLION degrees K to
      work at all, and we only got slightly above breakeven (Q=2) with the NIF project at LLNL (huge
      facility, very expensive, and only a shot or two per day). To date, no magnetic confinement
      experiments have reached breakeven (Q=1=Energy out / Energy in). For an actual commercial power planet, we will need around Q=100 or better to make up for all the losses and inefficiencies, and they won’t be flight weight outside of Sci-Fi.

      • Well … in a specific case (donut confinement and other Z-pinch macro fusion devices), you are right. P-B requires a lot of kinetic (“temperature”) energy.

        However, as I understand it, this is not the path taken. Could be wrong, but somewhere I read that the boffins were sending high-speed beams of charged boron nuclei into a cloud of water vapor. I guess… it doesn’t really make much sense; it could be a beam of protons into a boron hydride gas cloud, or, or, or…

        In any case though, when speeding up the ions, unlike thermal ones, the conversion of electron-volts of acceleration to particular ion velocities (equivalent to temperature) is pretty darn efficient. Something on the order of 50%. So, in a long-winded sort of way, “perhaps they’re onto something, sort-of”.

        ⋅-⋅-⋅ Just saying, ⋅-⋅-⋅
        ⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅

        • So you need a vacuum and a stream of water vapour, then you need to inject a boron beam. You also need to be far away from Greenies who will snivel at anything which involves radiation (alpha particles.)
          Set up a demonstrator on the Far Side of The Moon (there is already a sound track!) and see if you can set up a magnetic pinch to focus the fusion reaction and generate some power.
          You might even be able to make solar power economically viable!

  5. Stating things this clearly from the get-go would have made for more interesting discussions 🙂

  7. If this system really works, it doesn’t look like hot fusion.

    It looks like new physics, LENR, a mistake, or a lie.

    • It looks like they are going for regular p-B11 hot fusion, which yields 3 alphas exactly as is said. The triple product needs to be about 1000 times better than D-T fusion for this to make sense, so I wish them the best of luck but I have no hope in hell of this ever being practical. The oxygen makes it far worse and it behoves them to split the water and inject only the hydrogen and boron into the plasma.

      See e.g. Trialpha or focus fusion which are (or at least were) going for p-B11. Snowflake’s chance in hell of success.

      • LPP and boron pinches actually work well as pulsed propulsion, that is where LPP first came from. This stuff can work for station keeping but I think that high efficiency Hall thrusters are far more mature for long term thrust.

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