Jeff Bezos is investing in a fusion company (though as commenters there note, the technical explanation is pretty confusing). Maybe he wants to use it to power his spaceships.
12 thoughts on “What Does He Know?”
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Jeff Bezos is investing in a fusion company (though as commenters there note, the technical explanation is pretty confusing). Maybe he wants to use it to power his spaceships.
Comments are closed.
Is $19.5 M really that big of an investment in fusion energy research?
I mean, sure, give me $19.5 million, and I’d probably add you to my christmas card list (and actually start a christmas card list up again, for that matter), but I’m just a guy on the street making a living sitting in an office. How many billions of dollars have already been put into fusion research to date, and is Bezos’ contribution really all that large, even if he’s the primary contributor to a really small fusion research company?
“Personally, I liked the university. They gave us money and facilities, we didn’t have to produce anything! You’ve never been out of college! You don’t know what it’s like out there! I’ve *worked* in the private sector. They expect results.”
pdb, Ghostbusters ftw!
Yes, what does Francisco d’Anconia know?
How many billions of dollars have already been put into fusion research to date, and is Bezos’ contribution really all that large, even if he’s the primary contributor to a really small fusion research company?
Before SpaceX, how many billions of dollars had been spent on big government, big corporation cost-plus space systems? Maybe Bezos thinks a smaller research organization that isn’t tied to the current fusion mafia has a better chance of success. It’s his money and I wish him success.
Just because something has always been done a certain way, it doesn’t automatically mean that way is the best or only way to do it.
It may be completely unrelated to Blue Origin, just as Tesla is unrelated to SpaceX except through Elon Musk.
It may be indeed, but if it works, I would think that it will have space applications as well.
I’m not questioning the investment itself, as Bezos is free to do with his money as he pleases. My question is about whether or not it’s actually newsworthy that he’s investing his money in it. $19.5M is a drop in the buckets of both Bezos’ bank account as well as fusion research, and hardly seems worth reporting about. I’m sure he invests as much, if not more, in plenty of other things every month that never get reported on, is all…
Magnetized target fusion (GF’s approach) is one of the ideas that might end up making sense, since it may be able to avoid the problems with damage to the first wall (since the material around the plasma is sacrificed with each shot). Getting that all to work reliably at a high enough rep rate, and at low enough cost, is a not-so-small matter of engineering, of course.
Anyone interested in space transportation *ought* to be interested in finding an energy source having the highest energy yield per unit mass possible (specific impulse being proportional to the square root of that quantity). Surprisingly few in the field actually are interested in that, for reasons I’ll never understand. Elon Musk is a great example. He’s interested in “soft” energy, which has no hope of being useful even in terrestrial applications where specific energy is less important.
If Bezos has made the connection, he has my utmost respect.
“if it works, I would think that it will have space applications as well.”
You’d need one damn big rocket to use the GF approach. That thing is huge.
Focus Fusion is more likely to fit on a rocket. They’re already fusing enough to produce a viable business plan for producing x-rays, and the device is small. Adrea Rossi’s Energy Catalyzer is also compact, and already functioning if you believe him – he’s planning to have a 1 MW plant up and running in October.
Is $19.5 M really that big of an investment in fusion energy research?
Sure it is. You can demonstrate a small, very inefficient tabletop model of a fusion prototype at that level of funding and a larger, somewhat more efficient one to verify scaling estimates.
And Bigelow invests in UFO research to find a space drive. So what? Its their money. And who knows? Jeff Bezos might stumble on something in the process.