Micro-fusion by Friedwardt Winterberg

[Rand]

Ho "trovato" (da una pagina del forum di nasaspaceflight.com) un link a del materiale di Friedwardt Winterberg degli anni 50/70 e (presumibilmente) declassificato di recente:

Micro-fusion work of Friedwardt Winterberg from the 1950's-1970s was
recently declassified. Winterberg has several ideas for using
micro-fusion without fission bomb triggers to generate nuclear energy
or power spacecraft. Winterberg was proposing pure deuterium
micro-explosions.

Proposed use of a super Marx generator to ignite a pure deuterium
thermonuclear micro-explosion. In a super Marx generator, N Marx
generators charge up N fast capacitors FC to the voltage V, which
switched into series add up their voltages to the voltage NV. The
proposed super Marx generator can reach what nature can do in
lightning. The high voltage in natural lightning is released over a
distance about 1 km, and the same is true for the super Marx
generator.

For a propulsion system to transport large payloads with short transit
times between different planetary orbits: a deuterium fusion bomb
propulsion system is proposed where a thermonuclear detonation wave is
ignited in a small cylindrical assembly of deuterium with a
gigavolt-multimegampere proton beam, drawn from the magnetically
insulated spacecraft acting in the ultrahigh vacuum of space as a
gigavolt capacitor.

For a cost effective lifting of large payloads into earth orbit: the
ignition is done by argon ion lasers driven by high explosives, with
the lasers destroyed in the fusion explosion and becoming part of the
exhaust.

If launched from the surface of the earth, one has to take into
account the mass of the air entrained in the fireball. The situation
resembles a hot gas driven gun, albeit one of rather poor efficiency.
Assuming an efficiency of 10%, about 100 kiloton explosions would be
needed to launch 1000 tons into orbit. It would be a cleaner and more
public relations friendly version of the Orion Nuclear Pulsed
Propulsion system.

Da ignorante in materia non ci capisco molto.. comunque mi è sembrato interessante