Pulsar Fusion plans 500,000 mph nuclear rocket

The rocket’s eight-metre fusion chamber is currently being assembled in Bletchley, England. Its design has been informed by the success of the Princeton field-reversed configuration (PFRC) fusion programme, combined with AI and machine learning to optimise the magnetic fields required to confine the fusion plasma and power the rocket engine.

“The difficulty is learning how to hold and confine the super-hot plasma within an electromagnetic field,” said Dr James Lambert, CFO of Pulsar Fusion. “The plasma behaves like a weather system in terms of being incredibly hard to predict using conventional techniques.

 “Scientists have not been able to control the turbulent plasma as it is heated to hundreds of millions of degrees and the reaction simply stops. This unpredictability is attributed to the science Magneto-Hydro Dynamics (MHD) and Gyrokinetics, the state of the plasma is changing all the time.

“Scientists can get to fusion temperatures, as recently demonstrated at the Lawrence Livermore laboratory in 2022, and this will be achieved again more often going forward, but small improvements can dramatically improve the results in our favour.”