Interstellar Travel: the Birth of Fusion Drives

Welcome back to our series on Interstellar Travel, where we examine concepts that have been proposed since the dawn of the Space Age . In our previous installment , we looked at the earliest concepts to emerge from the Space Age. These reflected the nature of the times, where two superpowers were locked in a constant state of competition and advances in rocketry paralleled the development of nuclear weapons.

During this period, NASA and the Soviet Union also built and tested nuclear reactors that would generate heat or electricity for an advanced propulsion system. Their proposed systems fell into two categories: those that harnessed the power of shockwaves produced by nuclear explosions - Nuclear Pulse Propulsion (NPP) - and those that used nuclear reactors to heat propellant or generate electricity for an ion engine - Nuclear Thermal Propulsion (NTP), and Nuclear Electric Propulsion (NEC).