The first ignition of the plasma engine for spacecraft.

Pulsar Fusion, this British company that aims to build the first space tug powered by a fusion reactor, because its objectives are very interesting and would also save a lot of fuel for space rockets and would make trips to Mars, for example, much shorter but the problem is that at the moment they wrap their achievements with a very epic story and the massive use of images generated by artificial intelligence, apart from the fact that journalists get a lot of trouble these days.

This company has managed to successfully ignite the first plasma engine, it is not the rocket itself and it is not a fusion reactor, plasma uses electricity and they have not succeeded because they do not have a fusion reactor built, they have a long way to go to build a fusion reactor, nor does it have a fission reactor, they must have gotten electricity from the normal electrical grid, maybe from a hydroelectric plant, I don't know.

They have managed to ionize gas with electricity, to get the plasma, ionize the gas, because at the end of the day what they do, what they need, what drives the ship and what is going to drive their tugboat is an ion engine, so what you need is a gas, you need electricity and with that electricity you ionize the gas and that gas passing through the appropriate slits because it drives the ship, the electricity can come from the electrical grid, which I think is where they have taken it from right now to to test, either a fission reactor, which is what NASA wants to do, or a fusion reactor when they have it ready, this same company that wants to do it.

What they have used is krypton gas to make plasma for their ion engine, that is, in practice what they have achieved is to finally have an ion engine, well, achievement unlocked, it is something original and new, no, this is For many years now, not only with Krypton, but also with Xenon or other gases, in fact, an example of using Krypton for an ion engine is the at least initial fleet of SpaceX Starling satellites, which used this type of ion engine to change orbit, not to go out into space, because ion engines have very little thrust, they gain thrust over time once they are in space, to go out into space, you need a normal chemical fuel rocket. But once in space, these Starlink satellites used their ion engines to rise from orbit and place themselves in the appropriate orbit, so it is not a new thing.

The goal achieved is one of the steps you have to take to achieve what you want to do, which is very interesting, build a space tug and they have published a new video demonstrating what they want to do, they do not have the facilities, I hope one day they will have facilities like this that you are seeing in the video above, this is generated by AI and includes the tug.

That tug would be the fusion reactor and the ion engine, there are no humans in there, no place to put them and of course the gas fuel tank, which is not necessary much, it is the good thing that the script engines have, with this what they do would be to place these tugs in space, to place them in space they will need a ship, a normal rocket, they would be on a kind of platform waiting to enter service.

You leave Earth in your StarShip, you order a tugboat service, the tugboat hooks up the ship and pushes you until it takes you to Mars, it could do it in two months or even a month, once on Mars, you unhook, you land on the red planet and the tugboat returns to the tugboat service station that is orbiting Mars. And the same thing when leaving, you can order a service to go to an asteroid or Jupiter or wherever you want, so the idea is good.

The idea of ​​space tugs is not new either, the Russians wanted to develop one that I think was stopped due to the war issue, although theirs would be powered by solar energy, I was also thinking about making an advanced version with fission energy, putting a fission reactor to power the engine, you can get the electricity from solar panels or from a fission reactor or a fusion reactor if you had one, the problem with solar panels is that for trips to Mars or beyond, well the Sun does not It has a lot of effect, if it is to travel to Venus, Mercury or the Moon, it would work quite well.

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