UK’s Pulsar Fusion says its Sunbird nuclear fusion rocket concept could more than halve the time to travel to Mars and cut travel time to Pluto to about four years. The Pulsar team has been working on the project for a decade and it is “rapidly advancing toward in-orbit testing, with components of the system’s power supply set for demonstration later this year” for demonstration in orbit in 2027. Pulsar envisages a production-ready Sunbird in the early 2030s.
The Sunbird concept is for the fusion-powered ‘tugs’ to be permanently based in space, able to dock with spacecraft and propel them at high speed over vast distances. Pulsar Fusion says it foresees a compact nuclear fusion engine providing both thrust and electrical power for spacecraft, including up to 2 MW of power on arrival at a destination.
The potential application of nuclear fission and nuclear fusion for powering and propelling spacecraft is being investigated in various countries including by NASA in the US, in the European Union and China and in Russia. Rosatom recently revealed a laboratory prototype of a plasma electric rocket engine based on a magnetic plasma accelerator which it said could slash travel time to Mars to one or two months.
Pulsar says that in contrast to the large amounts of fuel required for a chemical rocket, the tiny amounts of the deuterium and helium-3 fuel mix required for fusion means “a spacecraft would launch with a fixed supply, sufficient for missions like Pluto in four years, with no mid-flight refuelling needed”.
Pulsar describes itself as a “space propulsion systems and services company delivering intelligent propulsion now and delivering the future through fusion propulsion”. It uses Hall Effect Thrusters, which generate thrust by ejecting neutral plasma.
Pulsar CEO Richard Dinan said: “Pulsar has built a reputation in this industry for delivering real technology – not just talking about it. We’ve recently commissioned not one, but two of the largest space propulsion testing chambers in the UK, if not all of Europe. Pulsar is now an international space propulsion testing powerhouse, and we have ambitious plans to grow rapidly from here.”
He added: “People say ‘doing fusion on earth is proving really hard – doing it space must be a crazy proposition’, but actually there’s a lower bar in space. Part of the problem is doing fusion in the atmosphere….But in space, things start to go in your favour. So if you are going to do fusion, then doing it in space is actually easier than doing it in the atmosphere.”
He noted that “if you look at this problem as simply an exhaust speed potential … then in terms of what can be produced in exhaust speeds, then fusion is the king of propulsion”.
Pulsar is “very interested” in nuclear fission, a proven technology that “is going to be a really big thing in the medium term, Dinan said. “But if we are going to be the species that can one day go to Mars and we want to go there with more equipment, then exhaust speeds are pretty much the most important and fusion gives you a pretty exciting prospect.”
