Flight Rates

Fascinating. I read the entire excerpt. Looks very
intriguing. I hope they can find the money to build
the WB 7 and 8.

GAry 7

>
> > 2. In
> > addition to concerns about enriching nations which
> support terrorism,
> > we're also increasingly concerned about
> greenhouse gas emissions.
> > SPS is the only potential replacement for fossil
> fuels which doesn't
> > have an attendant waste disposal problem.
>
> Not the only one -- if Bussard's recently revealed
> approach to
> proton-Boron fusion can be made to work, then this
> would produce
> abundant energy with no radioactivity (the only
> outputs are helium and
> electricity).
>
> This is unlike the tokamak approach to fusion, which
> does indeed
> produce radioactive wastes (though ones with a much
> shorter half-life
> than the waste from typical fission reactors).
>
> I've long been a skeptic of fusion, and I'm still a
> skeptic about the
> tokamak approach. But I'm cautiously optimistic
> about Bussard's new
> approach (see references below). We shouldn't
> despair about this,
> either -- if this form of fusion works, it can be
> used to produce
> rocket engines thousands of times more powerful and
> efficient than
> anything we have today, and would so dramatically
> reduce launch costs
> and in-space transit times that I suspect the solar
> system would open
> up to us almost overnight.
>
> Keep your eye on this technology -- it's still
> unknown who is going to
> pick it up and run with it, and how. But I think
> someone will. The
> next step is to wait for the technical paper Bussard
> is preparing,
> which will lay down all the theory and experimental
> results. Then I
> imagine we'll see other groups (such as the U. of
> Wisconson folks)
> attempting to reproduce his results. And if his
> results are confirmed,
> somebody will step in and aggressively pursue it --
> and I bet it will
> be a company, rather than the government, that will
> be first to the
> punch. Of course all this is speculation, but
> that's my guess.
>
> Best,
> - Joe
>
> Video of Bussard's talk at Google:
>
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid96321846673788606
>
> Transcript of Bussard talk at Google:
>
http://www.askmar.com/ConferenceNotes/Should%20Google%20Go%20Nuclear.pdf