STEAMPUNK FUSION

The picture you see above is a steam driven fusion reactor. I know what you are thinking. This is some kind of joke. It is no joke. General Fusion has a design that I think has an outside chance of working.

A lot more information on this here, in a PopSci article.

This is an elegant idea. The Chief hopes it works, and wishes he had some serious money to invest in it.

A travel entrepreneur who introduced hundreds of thousands of Americans to European travel in the 1960’s has taken luxury travel to new heights – the edge of space.

Jules Klar, founder of Phoenix, AZ-based RocketShip Tours, has announced that his company will immediately begin selling rides to the edge of space for $95,000 per flight. Participants will fly aboard the Lynx, a two-seat suborbital vehicle being built by California-based XCOR Aerospace.

The future is now.

Anyone got an extra $95K to sponsor the Chief for a great report? Ha ha.

A small California aerospace company today unveiled a new suborbital spaceship that will provide affordable front-seat rides to the edge of space for the millions of people who want to buy a ticket.

The company, XCOR Aerospace, of Mojave, CA, announced that its two-seat Lynx suborbital spaceship will carry people or payloads to where they will experience weightlessness and see the stars above and the Earth and its atmosphere below. This will launch XCOR into the emerging space tourism market, estimated at over a half-billion dollars.

The Lynx will offer affordable access to space for individuals, researchers and educators,” said XCOR CEO Jeff Greason. “Future versions of Lynx will offer ever-improving capabilities for scientific and engineering research and commercial applications.

The spaceship, roughly the size of a small private airplane, will first take off in 2010 and will be capable of flying several times each day.

First, Sir Richard Branson’s budding Virgin Galactic suborbital servide, and now this…Great!

Competition for the space tourism market! Maybe someday it’ll be cheap enough that even the Chief will be able to afford a trip to space!

THIS is the sort of progress that rejuvenates the Chief’s sometimes frazzled spirit of optimism!

This achievement has been described as “amazing” and “the biggest breakthrough in energy generation in decades”. It seems to indicate that no scientific hurdle stands in the way of nuclear fusion. Just 5-7 years of engineering and configuring about 60 next generation linear transformer drivers. Then refining the system for commercial use starting in 20 years or less. All the pieces are now ready and proven, we just need to put them together for commercial nuclear fusion. The Z-pinch system is also the basis of the minimag Orion space propulsion concept which enables speeds 50 times or more faster than current chemical rockets.

OPEC should read it and weep! YOU can read it and smile!

H/T to The Devil’s Kitchen from England.

How cool is THIS? Well, pretty cool since it’s between Siberia and Alaska, but also way cool otherwise too.

Russia plans to build the world’s longest tunnel, a transport and pipeline link under the Bering Strait to Alaska, as part of a $65 billion project to supply the U.S. with oil, natural gas and electricity from Siberia.

The project, which Russia is coordinating with the U.S. and Canada, would take 10 to 15 years to complete, Viktor Razbegin, deputy head of industrial research at the Russian Economy Ministry, told reporters in Moscow today. State organizations and private companies in partnership would build and control the route, known as TKM-World Link, he said.

A 6,000-kilometer (3,700-mile) transport corridor from Siberia into the U.S. will feed into the tunnel, which at 64 miles will be more than twice as long as the underwater section of the Channel Tunnel between the U.K. and France, according to the plan. The tunnel would run in three sections to link the two islands in the Bering Strait between Russia and the U.S.

This would include pipelines for Siberian oil and gas, as well as electrical transmission lines (to feed gigawatts of power from Russian tidal power plants into the US), as well as a high-speed rail and highway connection.

Talk about possibilites for a road trip – DRIVE to Siberia, and then on to Europe, etc? That will be cool! This is only win-win project, and will have economic impact comparable at least to the US transcontinental rail system.

The Chief has been following the development of this concept for a couple of years now, and it just as neat looking now as it was when he first heard of it.

They have a new video clip out about what’s going to be happening with this when it gets started in New Mexico.

Check it out…definitely way cool!