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This Defense Intelligence Reference Document from the Defense Intelligence Agency, dated 11 March 2010, was produced under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications (AAWSA) Program. It argues that spaceships powered by deuterium thermonuclear reactions could be built with current science and technology. The paper covers ignition by GeV proton beams, magnetic insulation, the Super Marx generator and conjectured chemical superexplosives, and it concludes that such craft could make manned exploration of the entire solar system possible.
UNCLASSIFIED//F'iA. 'iFFll!l*L 1!1!11! t,llt I gold, in the two foci of an ellipsoidal cavity. The radiation released by the exploding fission bomb, by ablating the gold, launches a convergent shock wave into the liquid deuterium. With the temperature in the shock wave approximately rising as 1/ r, where r is the distance of the shock wave from the center of the deuterium sphere, the ignition temperature is reached at some distance from the center. But only if this distance is larger than the stopping length of the DD fusion reaction products, typically a few cm, is a radially outward-moving detonation wave ignited. This configuration is essentially the same kind of "hohlraum" ( cavity) configuration used in the indirect drive mode of laser fusion for a small DT sphere. A configuration of this kind can still be used to burn deuterium if the DT microexplosion is used to trigger a larger deuterium explosion. For a starship that will depend on deuterium as its only rocket fuel, this possibility is excluded. But another possibility arises if the ignition is done with a 107-ampere gigaelectronvolt (GeV) proton (or deuterium) beam. If focused onto one end of a slender, cylindrical deuterium rod, the beam not only can be made powerful enough to ignite the deuterium, but its strong azimuthal magnetic field entraps the charged DD reaction fusion products within the deuterium cylinder, launching a deuterium detonation wave propagating with supersonic speed down the cylinder (Reference 13). There the fusion gain and yield can in principle be made arbitrarily large, depending only on the length of the deuterium rod. The range of the charged fusion products is determined by their Larmer radius where ti = a fi =- B C (2MAl~') 112 e Z (12) ( 13) In equation (13), c, e are the velocity of light and the electron charge, M the hydrogen mass, A the atomic weight, and Z the atomic number.Eis the kinetic energy of the fusion products. If the magnetic field is produced by the proton beam current I, one has at the surface of the deuterium cylinder the azimuthal magnetic field B, ~ 0.2 I/ r (14) Combining equation (12) with equation (14) and requiring that fi < r, one finds that 7 UNCLASSIFIED/ ,'f81il errI@Il!IL ""E one I
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Report, from the dia collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 37 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.