We just discovered that our NASA NIAC project on the DFD mission to Pluto was covered in a SciShow episode from June 14, 2016.
Hank Green does a great job talking about our project, and I love that he called it a “Pluto Explorer”, which rolls of the tongue better than “Pluto Orbiter and Lander”. However, he did get our fuel wrong: we are using deuterium and Helium-3, a reaction which produces no damaging neutrons. Hank cited “two types of heavy hydrogen”, which would imply deuterium-tritium fusion; this produces most of its every in very damaging neutrons, and is a reaction we go to great lengths to avoid in our machine. There will always be some tritium produced from the side reactions of deuterium with itself, but our machine is designed to exhaust it before it can fuse.
The comments from the viewers were interesting, including several along the lines of, “wait, did I miss fusion becoming a working technology?” Of course the fusion rocket is still theoretical, but it’s based on a real plasma heating experiment going on now at Princeton Plasma Physics Lab! And its true that many people don’t realize that fusion itself has been achieved in many machines, just not break-even fusion. Our machine is very different from the large tokamaks most people are familiar with.
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