If this pans out it will be a boom for space exploration / exploitation and have commercial applications here on our rock.
Can a Seattle Startup Launch a Fusion Reactor Into Space?
Practical nuclear fusion is, famously, always 10 years in the future. Except that the Pentagon recently gave an award to a tiny startup to launch a fusion power system into space in just five.
There is no shortage of organizations, from VC-backedstartups to nation states, trying to realize the dream of cheap, clean, and reliable power from nuclear fusion. But Avalanche Energy Designs, based near a Boeing facility in Seattle, is even more ambitious. It is working on modular “micro fusion packs,” small enough to hold in your hand yet capable of powering everything from electric cars to spaceships.
Last month, the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) announced it had awarded Avalanche an unspecified sum to develop its Orbitron fusion device to generate either heat or electricity, with the aim of powering a high-efficiency propulsion system aboard a prototype satellite in 2027. The contract to Avalanche was one of two awarded by the DIU—the second going to Seattle-based Ultra Safe Nuclear for development of its radioisotope battery.
The science of fusion is well understood. If you can force nuclei of hydrogen (or some other light elements) together, they will release large amounts of energy. However, most attempts to overcome the particles’ electrostatic repulsion in plasma involve either extremely high temperatures (as in the more than US $25 billion international Iter project) or powerful laser pulses or projectiles. Validating such approaches requires large, complex, and extremely expensive hardware.
Avalanche’s Orbitron, on the other hand, could theoretically fit on a tabletop. It relies on the Ph.D. thesis of Tom McGuire, a student working on inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC) fusion at MIT in 2007. IEC was first imagined by television pioneer Philo Farnsworth. An IEC device confines fuel ions in electric fields that are supported by spherical electrodes. The ions recirculate inside the IEC device, giving them repeated opportunities to fuse.