Pulsar Fusion is known for its “green” technologies. For example, he is currently working on a rocket engine that uses plastic waste as fuel. The thermonuclear engine is another of its ecologically oriented aspects in rocket engineering and energy.

What is known about the new engine

The PFRC facility was established at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in the early 2000s. It is based on the concept of reverse magnetic configuration and is used to test fusion engine ideas. Inside such an engine, high-pressure plasma is held by a magnetic trap, and cold fuel in the form of ions and electrons flows around the hot core, feeding on its energy. It is then ejected at tremendous speed from electromagnetic nozzles.

The companies will use plasma data obtained at PFRC-2 and advanced machine learning techniques to analyze the behavior of superheated fusion plasma in a rocket engine configuration. The research aims to find out how nuclear fusion plasma will behave when it comes out of a rocket engine, releasing particles at hundreds of kilometers per second.

The thermonuclear engine developed by the companies is the size of a minibus It will be able to accelerate a 10-ton spacecraft to approximately 800 thousand kilometers per hour. or 223.5 kilometers per second.

A fusion engine does not require the massive infrastructure needed to generate fusion energy for power plants on Earth. A thermonuclear installation would be able to generate electricity for onboard systems, and fuel running in space could be taken from dust, gas, and just about any substance. Small amounts of helium-3 and deuterium are required to initiate and maintain the thermonuclear reaction in the engine, which does not require a lot of space to store.

The partner companies believe a fusion engine will be demonstrated in space decades before fusion is used to generate commercial energy on Earth.