It's not a completely novel approach, and it's probably not a great investment compared to some other fusion startups, though I am glad people are investing in this rather than idiotic app companies. Kudos to the big-Y for taking on some useful risk. $1.5M is cheap, and should be dished out to many such companies.
Interestingly, the inventor seems to be interested in using the technology to build rockets. If they achieve > break-even, this might actually be a better use for the technology, as it is not obvious how to extract power from the plasma based on their patents, but it would be real easy to just shoot some plasma out one end of the thing for a dandy rocket engine. I guess MHD would work, and would not be a patentable innovation, but this really looks like a space rocket to me.
https://www.google.com/patents/US20140023170 https://www.google.com/patents/US20110293056
It's not a completely novel approach, and it's probably not a great investment compared to some other fusion startups, though I am glad people are investing in this rather than idiotic app companies. Kudos to the big-Y for taking on some useful risk. $1.5M is cheap, and should be dished out to many such companies.
Interestingly, the inventor seems to be interested in using the technology to build rockets. If they achieve > break-even, this might actually be a better use for the technology, as it is not obvious how to extract power from the plasma based on their patents, but it would be real easy to just shoot some plasma out one end of the thing for a dandy rocket engine. I guess MHD would work, and would not be a patentable innovation, but this really looks like a space rocket to me.