Video Transcript
Here's the Brousard Interstellar Ramjet. Let me read this to you guys. The biggest problem with propulsion at starflight levels is having to carry the propellant. All that fuel adds up. And the faster you want to go, the more you need, hence the more mass you need to push. Envisioned by Robert Bousard in 1960, a Bousard ramjet gets around the problem by collecting interstellar hydrogen in a vast electromagnetic scoop using hydrogen fusion to drive the vehicle. Unlike any other interstellar propulsion method, a Bousard ramjet would actually become more efficient the faster it went. The reason for that is because in theory, the faster it's going, the more hydrogen it can collect. Allowing travel at a high percentage of the speed of light. Subsequent studies though have shown that a ram scoop like this also causes serious drag issues, problems that would have to be addressed if the ramjet were ever become viable. Now, let me go ahead and say we know what is the answer. What is the answer to the drag issue, chat? Well, Paul Sizz would tell us the answer to the drag issue is a plasma sheath. A plasma sheath is the laser that you shoot in front of you to pre-ionize the air to make a plasma bubble. Now, you don't have any drag. What is the answer? And and let me just go ahead. I'm going to spoil most of this. So, this idea was actually famous. Again, I'm telling you that the science we're uncovering is directly connected to the lore in space propulsion, nuclear weapons research, fusion research, UFO, all of it. And do you know what everybody said? The reason why, the only reason why people were against it, people weren't against that it wouldn't work. They weren't against the physics. They weren't against the chemistry of anything that was happening because there's not enough hydrogen in outer space. Space is too empty. So like, sorry. So what? Like is anybody else just about to crash out right now? Cuz I'm like, wait, so there's not enough hydrogen in outer space. Great. Do you know where there is enough hydrogen? Uh here. in the atmosphere, in the water, really just anywhere on planet Earth. There's plenty of hydrogen everywhere. So, I'm just thinking think in my mind going like, why is that a downfall? Who cares if it can't fly to the moon? Yeah, it doesn't work in outer space. It works on Earth just fine. In fact, it's transmedium because there's hydrogen in the water and there's hydrogen in the air and we can ionize either of them. turn either of them into a plasma and use it to power our fusion orbs. The kind of proton fusion Bousard imagined only occurs at the heart of stars. Other kinds of fusion may be more practical for future ramjet designs. I went first thing when I read that I said what do you mean proton fusion? You say proton fusion to me to Ashen for you. You come to me saying, "Hey, Ashton, proton fusion." I go, "Do you mean proton boron 11 fusion? Give you that full side eye. Full side eye. Are you talking about proton boron 11 fusion, my man? It's called a neutronic fusion. The Bousard ramjet and Polywell fusion reactor. Robert Bousard synonymous with fusion power played pivotal roles nuclear space propulsion. In the early 1950s at the dawn of the cold war he joined the na nuclear energy for propulsion for aircraft NEA project at Oakidge National Laboratory. Now, I'm gonna interrupt a lot and add my own comments here. Oakidge National Laboratory. One of the things that is amazing about this is that just like we would have assumed if there's some secret technology, the people that are working on it are connected directly to the Department of Energy Labs. Oakidge, Los Alamos, Sandia. The goal was ambitious to explore how nuclear energy could power long range aircraft and eventually spacecraft. Oak Ridge. He helped lay the groundwork for thermonuclear fusion propulsion systems in which nuclear reactor would heat the propellant like hydrogen to high temperatures and expel it through a rocket nozzle creating thus thrust far greater than chemical engine. 1955 he joins Los Alamos and became a key participant in project rover a classified collaboration between Los Alamos and NASA's predecessor Naka the NACA rover sought to build a testing working nuclear rocket engines an effort that eventually evolved into Nerva Nerva would go on to successfully prototype engines in the Nevada desert proving that nuclear Lear thermal propulsion was not only plausible but technically achievable. Now I only give us that background cuz it's just insane to me. He says it applied his belief this when he was part of that project it cemented Busousard's belief that we could get to missions beyond Earth's orbit. So this is what gave birth to Basar's ramjet engine. So his thought was there should be hydrogen like even if it's diffuse there should be hydrogen everywhere in the solar system. So we should be able to or just anywhere in the universe we should be able to collect it up. We should be able to collect it up and use that hydrogen as our catalyst. Now if this sounds familiar to you let me just play you the first few seconds of this other video. When we think about hey we can use a little bit of hydrogen's out there and that's all the fuel that we need. We basically don't need fuel in our spacecraft. That should remind you of another video that we've looked at a lot. This one. >> Fusion is a much safer option. A next generation of airplanes that doesn't rely on fuel and can just stay aloft. Unlimited range, unlimited endurance. That >> there you go. Oh, wait. Hold on. Finish that thought. >> That's what nuclear fusion can do for an air. >> That's what nuclear fusion can do for an airplane is unlimited loft, unlimited endurance. Okay, so we came up with this idea of the Brousard Ram engine. funnel the hydrogen into a fusion reactor and the faster it goes, the more you can funnel in and you can accelerate to whatever speed you want, near light speed. Pretty smart idea. Okay. Um, how would it work? How would it go? So, the idea here is one that I think we've heard a lot. Actually, this is not unusual. I think that a lot of this has already leaked in the public consciousness is that you would accelerate your craft towards the speed of light and then you start to decelerate when you get halfway there. And by doing this, your relativistic you have some time dilation effect. So even if it's like four light years away, you can get there in like one year or you can get there in 10 years or something like that. So you can get there depending on how fast you go towards the speed of light. You can get there a lot lot faster than our current capabilities allow. Now we're not talking teleportation. We're not talking about wormholes here, but we are talking about really high speeds just using this uh by by funneling in the energy from externally from empty space. It's just not empty, right? There's little bits of hydrogen in there. Okay. So practical limits quickly surface. Space is much emptier than assumed, requiring scoops the size of small planets. Fusion with ordinary hydrogen is vastly inefficient. And any energy gained from the fusion might be offset by the energy required to accelerate the collected hydrogen to the ship's current velocity because you need that hydrogen to be going your speed, too. Later analyses concluded that the concept was theoretically beautiful. but physically infeasible with today's understanding. Nevertheless, remains a landmark. So there you go. You listen to that, you go, "Wait a minute." So you're telling me the downfall, the downside of this is that you couldn't collect enough hydrogen to make it work. So why can't it work in in the air? I mean, this is a weapon. You're telling me you can build a compact fusion reactor, but it just doesn't work in outer space? So what? That doesn't sound like a bad thing to me. I don't care about outer space. We got other weapons for outer space. Maybe this is the type of craft that we would use locally on this Earth, but maybe it's not the kind of thing that we would use if we want to go to Mars. Or maybe we use a different version of it, a differently engineered version if we want to go to Mars. So to address the painfully slow proton proton fusion rate, Whitmer proposed in the 1970s a catalyzed ramjet that carries trace amounts of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen by many orders of magnitude. But it also adds complexity. Now the starship must seed and manage catalytic nuclei while collecting reaction mass from the interstellar medium. So he's saying we can make it more efficient. We need these things like let's look carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen. And if we have that, then we can make our fusion reaction more efficient. Okay. Well, I'm sorry, but aren't these things that are just found in the air? Aren't these all like just easily commonly found in like the water and the air? Maybe carbon is a little bit harder, but feel like the rest of them are really easy. So when I see this, I go, isn't somebody definitely when this was coming around, when they were working on this was like, hey, why don't we just fly this around in the sky? Isn't that the sol isn't the the sol the solution to all our problems here? Uh, analyses showed that compressing and heating pure hydrogen to fusion conditions incurs brelong radiation. I don't know if I'm saying it right. That's what I'm going to call it. It's a hard ass word to say, chat. Bremlung radiation X-ray losses that can exceed the fusion power available making straightforward hydrogen burning ramjet a negative energy net energy. That conclusion pushed interest towards variants like the ram augmented interstellar rocket which carries its own fusion fuel but uses scooped hydrogen. Another line of work examined the scoop's interaction with plasma flows. Studies argue that the pla the magnetic ram scoop acts like a giant parachute in the solar and interstellar winds creating drag that can overwhelm plausible thrust. Useful for breaking though but problematic for sustaining acceleration. So the issue here would be that if you create this big net then there's going to be a force that gets acted upon it which is going to work against your acceleration. Now, if you don't have a huge net, then you're not going to have a whole lot of problems. So, again, this is just another problem that goes away when you now go from looking at the interstellar medium and just going to flying around on Earth. The tokamac ascent. Now, it's going to start getting spicy. At the dawn of 1970s, Busousard moved from the lab bench into Washington policy. He served as the assistant director for the Atomic Energy Commission's fusion division under Robert Hirsch. Wow. In the wake of the oil shock, he and colleagues pushed Congress to dramatically expand the fusion budget, arguing that the field needed a ste a step change in the scale to make real progress. Their initial strategy emphasized large Maxwellian plasma programs. Tokamax foremost, not as a final verdict on reactor design, but as a political and organizational lever. The plan as Basard later told it was to sca stabilize the big lab programs and peel off a meaningful fraction of funds for alternative lines that may have more been more practical. So this obviously did not work out because within months he says the original architect left government and the center of gravity shifted decisively towards tokamax and to this day 60 years 55 years later it's still all about tokamax. He argued magnetic fields while elegant struggle to confine neutral plasmas without crippling losses and scaling up toidal machines only amplified cost and complexity without delivering a clear route's economical power. In 1995 he circulated a letter explaining that early took backing had been tactical. By then he felt the enterprise had become a large budget preserving project rather than a power producing one. So what happened? This is crazy. Now, you guys know more about fusion than probably like 99.99999% of people out there. They built the tokamac reactors just to show the concept of the tooid. And what did we do with it? We decided that was the only way to make fusion work. And it was never going to work using a tokamac. Anybody out there doing tokamac fusion, you're wasting your time. that was only ever meant to show experimentally the idea. You got to take it way beyond that if you want to actually produce practical fusion for the grid, for our civilization. And then if you don't believe me, then listen to Robert Bousard himself. This guy is a a legend. Polywell fusion device. Here you go. So, what did he design? Polywell, a device aimed to combine the best of electrostatic and magnetic confinement. The core was to use a magnetic cusp fields chat. He's talking about a magnetic mirror. He's talking about a magnetic mirror, chat. Definitely talking about magnetic mirror right there. Remember the cusp strategy. The way that the field reverse configuration works is that you create a bubble, magnetic bubble that your plasma stays in. The problem is the plasma is trying to escape like this. So what do you do is you make a cusp, a magnetic cusp on the edge, almost like pinching your balloon close. And so when the the the it's still open, but what happens is when the particles try to escape, they follow the magnetic field path and they circle back in. They get trapped in this magnetic mirror bouncing back and forth. So the fact that I'm reading this say where this guy was already working on magnetic mirror type concept 1960 I [snorts] know right away just listening to this I'm going okay this has got to be similar to the field reverse configuration that we've been talking about. I mean it's got to be right like it's got magnetic mirrors in it. I mean okay keep going. And he says, "We're going to trap the electrons in the center of the chamber with this magnetic mirror. These electrons trapped in the center of the mirror would create a deep negative electric potential forming a virtual cathode. Positively charged ions attracted to this negative region would fall into the well, gain speed, and collide at high energies. It's not a fuser. It's a magnetic electrostatic fusion device and it works. Quote unquote. Dr. Robert W. Busousard. Crucially, the poly well had no physical grid inside the plasma unlike earlier electrostatic fusion devices like Farnsworth fuser which is what it's based on which lost efficiency because ions struck a metal grid. The polywell's virtual cathode was formed purely by electrons avoiding those collisions and their associated energy losses. The magnetic coils were arranged at the faces of a cube producing cusp regions at the edges and the corners at high plasma pressures. Once I saw this, I knew where this was going. High plasma pressures. The moment you start talking about plasma pressure, chat, I'm going to start talking about beta. Let's listen to what it says. At high plasma pressures, Bousard argued the internal plasma could push out against the magnetic field. Now you're definitely talking about it. A phenomenon known as the high beta effect. Boom. And there it is. Boom. And trap itself more effectively. So, what did we just learn? Now, I've changed my mind. I think that what's inside the orb is a cube. I think that is a polyhedral shape. I'm not even going to say cube. It's a polyhedral shape of donuts connected on top of each other all different directions that create cusps. And the magnetic fields just shoot out the particles axially in one direction or another. And the reason for this is because this is what would create a spherical plasma because you can imagine the plasma all around the cube. All around the cube. But the superconducting tooidal magnets that you use would prevent the plasma from actually touching the surface of any of the device of any of the electronics. Brousard says specifically that they changed the configuration of the polyhedral to avoid any of the plasma touching any of the components. specifically. So, this is where I go to Bob Greener, who I hope watches this, and I say, I don't think those are fully autonomous. I mean, they are drones and autonomous, but I don't think they're just plasma, those orbs in that video. I do think it's possible to produce just plasma orbs, but that's not what I think those orbs in that in the MH370 videos are. So this opens the door to many different types of possible plasma configurations that could possibly exist. And this connects I saw people saying it sacred geometry.