A British startup called Pulsar Fusion has come up with a wild new concept for a nuclear fusion-powered space rocket that, it claims, could significantly cut down the time it takes to travel to Mars in half.
As CNN reports, the UK Space Agency-funded company’s Sunbird rocket harnesses the power of nuclear fusion, the same process that powers stars, as a form of propulsion.
“It’s very unnatural to do fusion on Earth,” Pulsar founder and CEO Richard Dinan told CNN. “Fusion doesn’t want to work in an atmosphere. Space is a far more logical, sensible place to do fusion, because that’s where it wants to happen anyway.”
It’s important to note that the propulsion device is still almost entirely theoretical.
The important takeaway here is probably “still almost entirely theoretical.” But I take heart that someone is even thinking about it at all. The planet has wasted decades on not thinking about that enough. Everything is too far away for old propulsion methods.
Getting to Mercury on solar sails alone:
Turns out, it’s as tough to drop inward into the inner solar system, as it is to head outward. The problem stems from losing momentum from a launch starting point on Earth. It can take missions several years and planetary flybys before capture and arrival in orbit around Mercury or Venus.
Now, a new proposal would see a mission make the trip, using innovative and fuel-efficient means.
The new proposal comes out of the Advanced Concepts Office at the Marshal Space Flight Center, and was presented at the 56th Lunar & Planetary Science Conference (LPSC 2025) held at the Woodlands, Texas in early March 2025. Mercury Scout would be a Discovery-class mission.
The spacecraft would utilize a traditional launch carrier plus a kick stage booster to get it off the Earth and into a solar heliocentric orbit. The innovative part of the mission, however, is the large solar sail it would unfurl once it’s in space. This would be the spacecraft’s sole means of maneuvering and propulsion to reach and operate around Mercury.
Again, this is probably nowhere near happening. And probably never will, because it’s not the current direction of travel.
morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.
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