Lockheed's Fusion Promise

Researchers at Lockheed Martin made headlines this week with the announcement that they are on the fast track to building a nuclear fusion reactor. But experts responded with skepticism.

Fusion promises unlimited clean, renewable energy without the nasty byproducts of the uranium-splitting fission that drives today's nuclear plants. The problem is figuring out how to contain it. For hydrogen atoms to smash together with enough force to fuse, they must jitter and bounce with many times the heat of the sun's core. Tom McGuire, the Lockheed project lead, tells Popular Science their reactor will run at 200 million degrees. Matter that hot leaves the simple world of solids, liquids, and gasses to form a plasma. No solid vessel will contain that material, so fusion generators resort to suspending the roiling mass with powerful electromagnets. The best-funded fusion project in the world, called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), takes the brute force approach. It's fusion chamber, or "tokamak," stands 100 feet tall and, at 23,000 tons, has about the same mass as a tank battalion. If it's ever finished, it's expected to cost tens of billions of dollars.

McGuire's claim that his team of less than 10 people will solve the containment problem in a machine about the size of a school bus flies in the face of a long history of failures in fusion engineering.

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NASA 'Firmly Commits' To Space Launch System For Taking Humans To Mars

NASA has 'firmly committed' to launching the new Space Launch System rocket by 2018 - and one day using it to take humans to Mars.

The new rocket launcher is the largest and most complex ever devised, and will finally give NASA a way to send its own astronauts into space - a task for which it currently relies on Russia.

The SLS will also take explorers to asteroids and possibly to the Moon, as it looks set to be NASA's main ticket to space for the next 30-40 years.

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Man Drives Tesla From NY To Miami Without Spending A Cent

Normally, road trips cost a pretty penny, but one man recently proved that it's possible to drive from New York to Miami and back without spending a dime.

Michael Fritts, from Herkimer, New York, drove nearly 2,600 miles in his Tesla Motors Model S, an electric car that uses no gas, and re-charged his vehicle for free at 10 charging stations along the way, WKTV reports. The former truck driver left his wallet at home and set off for his road trip with a cooler full of food, vowing not to spend a cent.

Fritts -- who slept in the car's trunk while his vehicle was charging -- told Time Warner Cable News that he hoped his trip would bring greater attention to the capabilities of electric vehicles. But there was also another, much more personal reason behind the journey: This week marks the 10-year anniversary of his mechanical heart valve surgery.

"I wanted to celebrate the success of that by doing something special and fun and I also wanted to celebrate this wonderful vehicle," Fritts told WKTV.

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Dream Chaser space plane slated to make for orbit by 2016

Last we heard of Sierra Nevada Corporation's (SNC) Dream Chaser, the chubby little space plane had taken a bit of a spill during its last test flight. What could have been a disaster for the program, however, turned out to be one of those landings you walk away from with your head (and the all-important flight data) held high. Having actually garnered all the information they needed from their imperfect test flight, SNC is back in the saddle and aiming for a 2016 launch that will take the Dream Chaser into orbit.

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