Interstellar Space Travel Closer than Ever with Pulsar Fusion

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Today’s Highlights:

• Interstellar Space Travel Closer than Ever with Pulsar Fusion🚀

• Startup Ridwell Tries to Create A Waste-Free Future with Recycling Program♻️

Interstellar Space Travel Now Plausible with Pulsar Fusion

We have only come across interstellar travel and vast space exploration in sci-fi novels and films. Though fiction, it’s no doubt that many individuals have wondered whether the fascinating phenomena could someday be achieved by humans. What if it was possible?

While some people simply wondered, it seems others with the ability to make interstellar travel practicable are attempting it. Oxfordshire-based company Pulsar Fusion has been racing to become the first space firm to create a nuclear fusion-powered propulsion system.

This system could not only shorten the time and resources needed to travel to Moons and planets such as Mars, but it could also make traveling among stars in the galaxy plausible.

Fusion Energy

Founded in 2011, Pulsar spent most of its time focusing on fusion research, with deep space travel as one of its biggest goals. The reason behind the use of fusion is explained by Pulsar CEO Richard Dinan, who believes that fusion propulsion is “inevitable” and the only technology at the moment that could allow humans to leave their solar system.

Fusion is the process where two light nuclei* combine together to form a single heavier nucleus and release vast amounts of energy. Though the underlying physics of this process is well-understood, it has been questioned whether fusion energy is possible to produce due to its grueling nature.

To produce such energy, an ultra-hot plasma has to be confined inside an electromagnetic field. Confinement is the tricky part of this process, as the plasma has to be stabilized for a meaningful amount of time.

How is Pulsar Fusion going to achieve this?

*Nuclei: plural form of the nucleus, a collection of particles called protons, which are positively charged, and neutrons, which are electrically neutral.

Fusion Chamber

In early July, Pulsar started constructing a large, eight-meter nuclear fusion chamber in Bletchley, England. By building this chamber, the company hopes to bring plasma to ultra-hot temperatures and create high-speed exhausts speedy enough to make interstellar travel happen.

According to Pulsar Fusion’s CFO, James Lambert, the plasma is “incredibly hard to predict using conventional techniques,” and the trickiest part is, again, the confinement of the super-hot plasma.

Pulsar is collaborating with New Jersey-based Princeton Satellite Systems, a company that is providing Pulsar with supercomputer simulations. With said simulations, the pair can better understand how the plasma will behave in the electromagnetic field, making the process of confinement, at the very least, more predictable, if not simpler.

With Princeton Satellite Systems’ assistance, Pulsar will also model how the plasma would act when exiting rocket engines, which would help Pulsar create its rocket engine’s design. After the most ideal design is made, Pulsar would be able to do an in-orbit demonstration, entailing the company’s very first attempt to fire a nuclear-fusion propulsion system in space.

Every step Pulsar takes has been done and handled with complete care. Though this has caused Pulsar’s progress to move relatively slowly, interstellar space travel is still now getting closer than ever.

Ridwell Recycling Startup Expands for A Waste-Free Future

The 3R campaign we all know as Reduce, Reuse, Recycle has played a big part in waste management. The implementation of this campaign has helped not only save up a lot of landfill spaces but also reduce the resources needed to process different types of waste materials. Aside from that, 3R has also made many individuals become less wasteful, helping save the Earth one step at a time.

The campaign has also pushed numerous amounts of entrepreneurs to create recycling startups. These startups, such as PureCycle Technologies, Rubicon Global, RoadRunner Recycling, and Ridwell, assist individuals and businesses in managing their recyclable waste and materials.

Seattle-based startup Ridwell, for instance, assists households by picking up hard-to-recycle items from their doorstep.

Ridwell Recyclables

Founded in 2018 by CEO Ryan Metzger, Ridwell focuses on creating a world without waste for future generations. To achieve this, Ridwell aims to reduce the amount of trash that goes to landfills and process recyclable materials properly. At the moment, Ridwell operates across states in the US, including Seattle, Denver, Atlanta, Austin, Minneapolis, and Portland.

Ridwell collects various categories of recyclable and reusable items, such as textiles, styrofoams, lightbulbs, and batteries. It also stores and processes different types of plastics, like plastic clamshell containers and plastic film. Recently, Ridwell has also started offering to collect multi-layer plastic, which includes bags for chips, pet food, candy wrappers, and other packaging that would usually get tossed out and fill up landfills without having been properly processed.

Ridwell calls its multi-layer plastic program the first of its kind, as not many recycling companies have been able to implement a similar service. Unlike other types of plastic, the multi-layer is made of different plastic types fused together, thus making their recycling process more complicated than usual.

Ridwell Processes

One of the most logical reasons behind the rise of recycling companies comes from the fact that many individuals often don’t know where to dispose of their recyclable and reusable waste. Having big bags of soda cans or plastic bottles in your backyard shed or garage without knowing where to put them next sure isn’t a rare sight.

Being a more resourceful entity compared to individual households, startups such as Ridwell have a variety of partners which assists Ridwell in processing its various categories of waste. Arqlite, for example, turns Ridwell’s plastics to create microplastic-free and leach-free artificial stones that can support plant life. Hydroblox uses Ridwell’s collected waste to make water drainage material, while ByFusion builds construction-grade building blocks.

Realizing that people everywhere are trying to take action for the environment, Metzger has plans to expand its services to many other states, hopefully in the near future.

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