Friday, May 13, 2011

My Kingdom For A Horse

The phrase is a little differently defined here than what I thought it would be.  But this post has nothing to do with Shakespeare.  The meaning I thought that may be applicable is this:  if a king had access to this, he may really be wiling to trade his kingdom for it because it was so valuable.  I use this phrase with respect to the idea that I've been batting about here: fusion propulsion.

The key here is recognition by way of little bits of pieces of information that convince me of its probable utility.  I found another today while  browsing the subject.  A pdf file produced by none other than Robert Bussard himself.  Perhaps the intuition came from listening to him speak on the matter before.  At any rate, the Isp for such a rocket appears to be near 1 million- yes 1 million.  An incredible number.  Bussard's paper gives little detail to this propulsion method, instead describing two other types.  Here is a snippet of the file here



Now, Bussard is referring to a polywell fusion device, whereas I am looking at a dense plasma focus.  Also, I've been thinking about a less than net energy device.  The thought occurred to me, why not mate it with an energy source as described above that will feed into the dense plasma focus in order to produce the reaction mass?  A possible energy source:  cold fusion device being worked on by Rossi Focardi.  In a short time, a device like this may be possible for deep space missions.

The ability to travel at will throughout the solar system may be worth a king's ransom indeed.

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