The company says that unlike the large amounts of fuel required for a chemical rocket, the relative tiny amounts of the deuterium and helium-3 fuel mix required means “a spacecraft would launch with a fixed supply, sufficient for missions like Pluto in four years, with no mid-flight refuelling needed”. (Repost)

The Sunbird nuclear fusion rocket concept has the potential to more than halve the time to travel to Mars and cut travel time to Pluto to about four years, the UK’s Pulsar Fusion says.

The company says its in-house 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” and then demonstrated in orbit in 2027. They hope for 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 on to 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 as much as 2 MW of power on arrival at a destination.