NASA Funded 'Fusion Rocket' Could Make Manned Mars Missions Possible

A NASA funded research project at the University of Washington is working on a "fusion powered rocket." If successful, the rocket could potentially send spacecraft to Mars in just 30 days.

That's a pretty incredible figure considering NASA's estimate of a four year round trip using current technology. If the research team can pull it off, it could very well be the start of manned missions to the red planet.

The University of Washington team is being led by John Slough, and have spent the last few years developing each of the fusion rocket's stages. Now they feel they are ready to bring it all together and produce an actual working rocket. This will be a major hurdle, as creating the fusion process that will power the rocket has been in the making for over 60 years with no success.

However, if they can crack it, it would allow spacecraft to use fusion fuel, which is seven million times more dense than the fuel we use today. The incredible weight and expense of rocket fuel has been one of the main reasons we have so few space missions.

The UW design would use a pellet of deuterium-tritium and large lithium rings to create a huge magnetic field, causing the metal to contract around the pellet. Theoretically, these rings would implode with such pressure that the fuel would compress into fusion, causing a massive explosion and ejecting the metal rings out of the rocket at 67,000 miles per hour. This would be repeated every 10 seconds to accelerate the rocket to over 200,000 miles per hour. This is approximately 10 times faster than NASA's Curiosity traveled on its way to Mars.

Unfortunately, that's all theoretical, and the team has yet to successfully test this rocket propulsion method. In any case, it's still a very exciting technology that will hopefully mean a manned voyage to Mars in our lifetimes.