[venomsnake]

I am a bit skeptical of any technology that uses helium. We just don't have viable ways to obtain reliably enough of the stuff reliably.

[arethuza]

Well, there is an expensive plant in France that will be manufacturing helium from raw materials ;-)

http://www.iter.org/

[venomsnake]

Nuclear fusion has always been 10 years away. Lets hope that they will succeed this time.

[shabble]

The fusion itself is (afaik) essentially a solved problem. The trick is extracting net energy from it, since you use a lot in generating the plasma, massive magnetic fields to keep it contained, etc.

But if you just cared about the byproducts, I think that's a much easier problem.

Probably still 10 years though :)

[maxerickson]

It doesn't look like it consumes it. So we could probably build hundreds or thousands of these things without much trouble.

[DuskStar]

As far as I can tell, the production version will use LH2 instead of Liquid Helium to cool the incoming air. (after which the Helium will be burned for thrust, no need to cool it back down)

It's a similar to how most rocket engine nozzles are cooled.

[venomsnake]

You mean Hydrogen will be burned? Noble gases have hard time reacting. Except xenon with fluoride and nitrogen but you want to be away when these bonds break.

[DuskStar]

Ow, that's a bad mistake. Yeah, the Hydrogen fuel will both be used to cool the incoming air and burned for thrust.

Looking back at that comment - how did I make that many typos?!?