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This Defense Intelligence Reference Document, dated 1 November 2010, was produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency under its Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications (AAWSA) Program. It surveys propulsion technologies that include chemical, ion, and nuclear fission rockets, fusion schemes, aneutronic fusion, and antimatter propulsion. It also covers radiation shielding and speculates on research needs over the next 30 years for missions from low Earth orbit to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Alpha Centauri. The document concludes that aneutronic fusion promises to be an important mechanism for future space propulsion.
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UNCLASSIFIED/ ,'l"e" Cl"l"!e1,it tl!!L e11t I using D-Li6 fuel pellets. The estimated travel time of this system to Alpha Centauri was 100 years at an average velocity of about 0.5% of the speed of light. OTHER ANEUTRONIC ROCKET DESIGNS Antimatter-Catalyzed Fusion In the 1990s, Pennsylvania State University worked on a fusion rocket design that employed antimatter to catalyze fission reactions in uranium. As a comparison, in order to make a nuclear fission bomb for space propulsion, approximately 12 kg of uranium-235 is required to generate the three critical masses required. Using antimatter, this can be achieved with gram-quantities of uranium. Magnetized Target Fusion Plasma guns are used instead of lasers to generate heat in a low-density fusion fuel mixture confined by magnetic fields. The fuel is rapidly compressed to ignite fusion. The NASA/MSFC HOPE (Human Outer Planets Exploration) Group estimates that this propulsion system could transport payloads to Jupiter within about 300 days. Ion Drives The VASMIR engine is a highly efficient ion thruster that uses an RF resonant cavity to accelerate ionized argon or xenon gas as a propellant. One concept is to generate electricity from aneutronic fusion by capturing the energy of the emitted ions in a magnetohydrodynamic generator. The electricity would then be used to power the VISMIR ion drive. This direct conversion drive could capture useful energy from aneutronic fusion or from D-T fusion which is easy to ignite, but loses about 80% of its energy to neutrons. The neutrons can be used to generate secondary ions through impact on a target and the ion energy can be collected in the MHD generator. COMMERCIAL DEVELOPMENT In addition to teams from universities and national laboratories, several companies have been formed to develop aneutronic fusion propulsion systems. Several are discussed below. 1. EMC2 Fusion Development Corporation A prolific designer and author, Dr. Robert Bussard has explored inertial electrostatic confinement fusion as used in the Farnsworth-Hirsh Fusor. 13, 14, 1s, 16, 17 He and his colleagues formed EMC2, a private company based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to test components of a practical fusion drive. Their work has been funded by DARPA, NASA, and the U.S. Navy. Outlined in Figure 11, his QED (charged particle electric discharge engine) is based on the Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor, an ion accelerator patented in 1968. This accelerator works through the use of spherical electrodes that force ions toward the center of a spherical chamber by Lorentz forces. By injecting preheated ions of deuterium and helium-3 or boron-11 into the fusor core, the resulting fusion 22 UNCLASSIFIED/ ,'l"8" 81"1"1@1,_L tl9I!! CIILY
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Report, from the dia collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 50 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.