Thorium vehicle will run 100 years on 8 grams of fuel

[bananas]

18. Fusion propulsion is a lot easier than electricity generation

VASIMR is basically a fusion engine that doesn't get hot enough for fusion - it still provides lots of thrust.

A fusion engine doesn't have to generate more energy than you put in, it just has to generate more energy than a non-fusion ion engine.

http://www.space.com/23084-mars-exploration-nuclear-fusion-rocket.html

Quick Fusion-Powered Trips to Mars No Fantasy, Scientists Say
By Mike Wall, Senior Writer | October 07, 2013 06:50am ET

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The team's fusion-driven rocket would rely on a plasma created using deuterium and tritium, "heavy" isotopes of hydrogen. ("Normal" hydrogen contains no neutrons, while deuterium has one and tritium contains two.)

Bubbles of this plasma would be injected into a chamber, where a magnetic field would collapse metal rings around them, briefly compressing the bubbles into a fusion state. The energy released by the fusion reactions would vaporize and ionize the metal, which would be accelerated out the back of the spacecraft through a nozzle, creating thrust.

Solar panels would generate the energy necessary onboard the spacecraft to put all of this in motion.

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Slough and his team are building hardware and conducting experiments to help bring the technology closer to implementation. They hope to check off a big milestone sometime in 2014.

"We're in the lab, we're building the coils, we're showing the scaling and we'll be producing the neutrons within the next year to show that fusion is occurring, and it's occurring at the scales required to build a fusion-driven rocket," Pancotti said.