I just had a horibly wonderful dream. What if the EM drive is real? And what if Robert Bussard can build his fusion reactor? Why, we'd have at least our solar system opened up to us, and we'd be able to send probes to the nearby stars in a reasonable amount of time for a reasonable amount of money.
However, that EM drive is really iffy. Some might say flakey. An impossible fraud. Still, he has equations to explain its operation and there's enough on the site that I think someone would be able to replicate his device and results. It supposedly converts microwave energy directly into thrust/momentum somehow. Anybody with money and knowhow should be able to make one. I don't have any money, but I think I could go to Home Depot or Lowes and get the parts to make one. Basically it's just a sealed copper tube hooked up to a magnetron.
I have much more confidence in the fusion reactor that Dr Bussard describes. He uses electrostatic fields to confine and squish a plasma to fuse hydrogren. Most research today is focusing on using magnetic fields to confine a plasma, but that doesn't work too well. Dr Bussard took a concept call a 'fusor' which uses an electrified grid to create a 'well' of electrostatic potential which traps ions, and then basically got rid of the grid. These fusors are incredibly simple devices. High school students have been known to build these types of fusion reactors. And they are sold comercially as neutron sources. But because the metal grid stops the electrons needed to create the well potential they suck up more power than they create.
Bussard and his team managed to get rid of the grid by capturing the electrons in a magnetic field. This works fairly well because electrons weigh practically nothing. Then the electrons create the potential well, which attracts the ions, and then the ions bump into each other, occasionally getting married and spewing off some child energy which this reactor can by its very desgin directly tap into and convert to electricty. High voltage DC. Very high voltage DC...fusors typically run in the tens of thousands of volts. All Dr. Bussard needs is $200 million to build and test a full size reactor.
Imagine if someone builds both that fusion reactor and working high perormance EM drive. We could take the power straight from the fusion generator and pump it into EM drive and get insane acceleration and top speeds. Cheap access to space. Manned missions to Jupiter in a week. A month to Saturn. No explody rockets. Just us humans, crawling all over the solar system like a bad case of crabs.
