3 ms·

PFRC2? I think the whole fusion thing is like A.I. or electric vehicles. You simply need someone to really push it, and you can get there. Instead of having

• bryanlarsen 3y ago
  Estimated performance is 10 Newtons per megawatt. Useful to replace ion engines for interstellar spacecraft, but not useful to escape Earth's gravity well. cf Starship with about 75 million Newtons of thrust. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Fusion_Drive https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Fusion_Drive
  • startupsfail 3y ago
    If you have a good, compact inexhaustible source of clean energy that gives you megawatts of it, you should be able to turn it into delta-V. You can use atmosphere as the propellant. And accelerate as much as you need at the upper levels of atmosphere. Potentially you can use aerodynamics (basically fly inverted) to get to even higher velocity than the orbital velocity. Then, you can stay there at the upper levels, as long as you need to, and charge your tanks (you can initially take off with an empty tank of propellant). Once this is done, you can adjust the angle of attack and ease of into the higher orbit, switching to space flight. It involves hypersonic flight, but there is nothing impossible here.