astrofuel

This might be behind recent rumblings about the administrations renewed interest in space.

This comment by EBKennel:

"This concept was invented by Jerry Kulcinski and John Santarius (both friends of mine) of the University of Wisconsin in the mid-1980s. Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative funded them a little bit, with yours truly as the technical monitor. The main selling point is that it is aneutronic fusion, but it requires more energy to initiate. The thought was, if we ever wanted to obtain a lot of He-3, it is actually cheaper to fly to the moon to get it, rather than collect it from terrestrial sources. Fusion propulsion and power were also considered to be attractive in the far term, because of the very high temperature that everything operates at. But I think it will be a while before we are using fusion reactors to supply cheap electrolysis energy for automotive fuel cells."