One of my favorite companies, Lockheed Martin, has unveiled a very compact Fusion Reactor. Here are the details in a Youtube presentation
The page with a detailed release including the Youtube video is here:
http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.html
I had to laugh at the stories that were spun by the media. Many of their press releases stated that this development was based on ‘Cold Fusion’. Nope, this is the real thing! I also found a Youtube one-hour long tutorial on the Dense Plasma Focus technology which may be complementary to the LMT development here:
And, at CERN, they are learning to create, trap, and store antimatter. See it here:
The energy created by matter/antimatter collisions is far greater than that produced by fusion. This could be an alternate power system for a starship in the future (booted up by the fusion reactor). Consider the NASA project involving Warp Drive here:
The new “Hot” fusion reactor makes all of the foregoing doable, and the NASA effort will get legs…..In the meantime Fusion can get us to Mars in a week, and the outer system within a month.
The main unsolved problem as I see it is how do you avoid interstellar debris? Do you stop forward motion of the starship periodically to chart a pathway that is safe to travel? Can you warp your way around a Neutron star or black hole in the middle of your flight trajectory before it’s too late? Can the space-time bubble surrounding the vessel harmlessly warp objects like a small asteroid out of the road, and do it in time to avoid a horrific collision? And here, Astronomers have spotted objects in the outer reaches of the universe that are apparently traveling much faster than the speed of light.
Could these be aliens zooming around?
