Robert W. Bussard (August 11, 1928 – October 6, 2007) was an American physicist who worked primarily in nuclear fusion energy research.
Due to the presence of high-energy particles throughout space, much of the interstellar hydrogen exists in an ionized state (H II regions) that can be manipulated by magnetic or electric fields.
Hydrogen itself does not fuse very well (unlike deuterium, which is rare in the interstellar medium), and so cannot be used directly to produce energy, a fact which accounts for the billion-year scale of stellar lifetimes.
This problem was solved, in principle, according to Bussard by use of the stellar CNO cycle in which carbon is used as a catalyst to burn hydrogen via the strong nuclear reaction.
Following a standard hi-tech faster/cheaper/better learning curve, he started with robot probes during the early stages of interstellar colonization and eventually plotted them as affordable to wealthy individuals relocating their families off a too-crowded Earth (in "The Ethics of Madness").
[10] Bussard worked on a promising new type of inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC) fusor, called the Polywell, that has a magnetically shielded grid (MaGrid).
On March 29, 2006, Bussard claimed on the fusor.net internet forum that EMC² had developed an inertial electrostatic confinement fusion process that was 100,000 times more efficient than previous designs, but that the US Navy budget line item that supported the work was zero-funded in FY2006.
[14] Bussard provided more details of his breakthrough and the circumstances surrounding the end of his Navy funding in a letter to the James Randi Educational Foundation internet forum on June 23.
Bussard presented further details of his IEC fusion research at a Google Tech Talk on November 9, 2006, of which a video was widely circulated.