An audacious scheme to harvest gas from the planet Uranus could be our best hope for fuelling interstellar space travel,according to the team behind Project Icarus.
Helium-3 is an enormously useful gas for fusion reactions. It’s not radioactive, and its sole high-energy by-product is a proton, which can be contained in electric and magnetic fields, resulting in direct net electricity generation. That means clean, efficient fusion power.
The problem is that there isn’t much helium-3 left on Earth. What there is sits deep in the mantle, trapped during the formation of the planet. There’s thought to be more on the Moon, thanks to the solar wind impacting on its surface over billions of years, but the gas giants of the outer solar system are basically where the party’s at if you’re looking to pick up helium-3.
Project Icarus is the reincarnation of Project Daedalus from the 70s, which aimed to design a plausible interstellar unmanned spacecraft which would reach its destination within a human lifetime, using current or near-future technology. Icarus will again challenge scientists and engine… >>>
