Apollo Fusion

[crowberry]

Apollo Fusion is developing a fusion - fission hybrid approach. Their home page is at http://apollofusion.com/. Here is an article about the company https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... ear-energy.

[Skipjack]

Not a whole lot of technical details to go by.
Helion tried to do a fusion fission hybrid as a sort of low risk intermediate step on their path to a pure fusion reactor. The problem was much less of technical nature than cultural. Fission people don't want "all that complicated fusion reactor stuff" in their simple fission reactors. Fusion people don't want "all that dirty fission reactor stuff" with their clean fusion reactors. So no one was interested. If there had been a political pressure to make it happen, we could have had it years ago. Helion's linear reactor design is very suitable for this and it would have worked quite wonderfully.
Curious what Apollo intends to do. Hope it is not a tokamak, lots of engineering challenges making fusion fission hybrids with those due to their geometry.

[Skipjack]

Still not a lot of technical details on their website, but it seems like they have spun off some tech into a Hall thruster called "ACE":
http://apollofusion.com/ace.html

[dnavas]

I worked for Mike in an earlier startup. As far as I know, they're 12 people working on an ion thruster. I haven't heard anything from him recently on the fusion front, sadly.

[Carl White]

"Astra to acquire spacecraft propulsion company Apollo Fusion"

https://spacenews.com/astra-to-acquire- ... lo-fusion/

Astra is purchasing Apollo Fusion for $30 million in stock and $20 million in cash in a deal announced June 7. The deal includes an additional $95 million in earn-out incentives if Apollo Fusion reaches certain technical and revenue milestones.

Apollo Fusion is described as "a company developing electric propulsion systems for spacecraft". They've sold their Apollo Constellation Engine (ACE) to several customers.