Reply To: Great News!

[zapkitty]

ikanreed wrote: You know what really scares me about fusion thrusters?

Kzinti?

ikanreed wrote: You have limited resources to restart them once you end the reaction.

As almost all current fusion contenders which are also drive candidates are pulsed concepts that seems to be a non-issue 😉

(Polywell could be an exception)

More seriously, you’re thinking in early NASA’ish terms of all-or-nothing mission parameters. Even the STS did a little better than that.

ikanreed wrote: Low earth orbit is not a place to which I’d like to take a one way trip.

Non-sequitur. LEO is almost certainly where early fusion-powered spacecraft will [em]start[/em] their journeys.

If you’re in LEO and can’t restart your drive and if for some strange reason you don’t have basics like an engineering crew w/ toolboxes aboard then you use maneuvering thrusters to waddle back to the station and make repairs. If the thrusters are also out then you ask station ops to send out a tug to haul you back to the station.

If it’s an emergency and you have to evacuate immediately then you get in your Dragon, Soyuz or Orion lifeboat and return directly to Earth…

And yes, on Titan orbit would be another matter.

That’s why that ships that go out that far will have actual engineering spaces with actual engineers and those engineers will have actual toolboxes…

… somebody could photoshop an EMU into a photo of LPPX and label it “Derek in LEO…”