One of the biggest hurdles that those interested in space exploration have tried to conquer for years is how long it takes to go from one planet to another. Interstellar travel is one of the biggest dreams for humanity, and NASA along with other space agencies are constantly attempting to improve technology to be able to travel to Mars and beyond, but even though colonizing Mars is a pipe dream for many reasons, a space company out of the U.K might have figured out how to get there, and the answer is almost unbelievable, but it involves a nuclear rocket.
Despite the outlandishness of the idea, it really is not a bad one, and Pulsar Fusion, based in Bletchley, England, seems to be determined to make their idea of using a fusion-powered propulsion system work. They have called the project Sunbird, with the main idea being that it would be launched into Earth’s orbit, hook up to a spacecraft, and then take off to places like Mars or even beyond.
A trip to Mars made feasible due to nuclear power
As of right now, a trip to Mars takes seven to ten months depending on launch times and the technology used to get there, but Pulsar Fusion seems confident that they could do the trip in half of that time. The company already produces more conventional space propulsion systems, using chemical and electric engines, but this is a big change in their strategy, which according to a statement they made, they believe it is the best way forward.
“To leave our planetary neighbourhood and to live on other worlds, a propulsion and power source that delivers at scale is needed,” the company says. “Fusion is the best choice.”
They are so sure of the direction of the company that founder and CEO, Richard Dinan, revealed plans to test some of the major components of Sunbird by 2027, although testing would happen in orbit, not here on Earth.
For those unfamiliar, nuclear fusion involves pushing atoms together to generate energy, which is the opposite of what we do in current nuclear power plants. This technology is quite hard to achieve and it powers the Sun, which makes it dangerous on earth at the scale necessary to make it useful but if we could harness the power it could solve our current energy crisis quite efficiently.
According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, “If nuclear fusion can be replicated on earth, it could provide virtually limitless clean, safe and affordable energy to meet the world’s energy demand. […] With just a few grams of these reactants, it is possible to produce a terajoule of energy, which is approximately the energy one person in a developed country needs over sixty years.”
Fusion is in theory much safer than fission, as the elements it uses and transforms into are far less contaminant than uranium, the main byproduct in fission. Most fusion experiments try to fuse deuterium and tritium, which are two heavy forms of hydrogen, but Pulsar wants to use deuterium and helium-3, a rare isotope of helium.
The good thing about Pulsar’s approach is that, while fusion is proving extremely difficult to pull off on Earth due to the need for high temperatures and tight control, they are taking the experiment to its natural occurring place, space.
As Dinan explains, “It’s very unnatural to do fusion on Earth. Fusion doesn’t want to work in an atmosphere. Space is a far more logical, sensible place to do fusion, because that’s where it wants to happen anyway.”
If the experiment works, Sunbird could potentially reach 500,000 miles per hour, making it the fastest spacecraft ever built, beating out NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, which maxed out around 430,000 mph. This could make it easier to expand out horizons beyond Mars, as Pulsar says Sunbird could make it to Pluto in just four years. For comparison, NASA’s New Horizons probe, which launched in 2006, took nearly ten years to get there.
And Dinan is not stopping at Mars, he is thinking a lot farther away “If we’re going to leave our solar system within a human lifetime, there is no other technology that we know of that can do that.”