Fusion power is the technology that is 30 years away, and always will be, according to skeptics, at least. Despite its difficult transition into a reliable power source, the nuclear reactions that power the sun have a wide variety of uses in other fields. The most obvious is in weapons; hydrogen bombs are to this day the most powerful weapons we have ever produced. But there's another use case that is much less destructive and could prove much more interesting—space drives.

The concept fusion drive, called a direct fusion drive (or DFD), is in development at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL). Scientists and Engineers there, led by Dr. Samuel Cohen, are currently working on the second iteration of it, known as the Princeton field reversed configuration-2 (PFRC-2). Eventually, the system's developers hope to launch it into space to test, and eventually become the primary drive system of spacecraft traveling throughout the solar system.