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The exhaust produced would propel the vehicle to over 166,000 mph, taking passengers to Jupiter in just under 4 months. In Williams’ engine prototype, this tokamak would be nearly spherical-more like a donut hole. One way to do this is with a tokamak, a device that generates a donut-shaped magnetic field that keeps the superheated plasma in place. It’s costly and time-consuming to test these systems on real spacecraft, so some participants ran their programs through Kerbal instead. In 2018, NASA released Open MCT, a telemetry data visualization software designed for operating spacecraft, to the public on Github. In fact, it’s such a great sandbox that engineers at SpaceX and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have used Kerbal graphics in their presentations. Though we don’t yet have the technology to implement these specific-impulse demons, there is some real world value in being able to simulate advanced engines in a low-stakes environment. In the end, he built out 13 different engine concepts, including fusion engines-like The Expanse's Epstein drive is theorized to be-fission engines, and antimatter rockets. “That was super fun, which might be a super nerdy statement, but you know.” He crunched the numbers, considered how much power a specific engine would need, how to deal with the heat produced, and how you’d harness the energy to propel the virtual rocket further.

“You need to kind of think a little bit critically about what people have hand waved.”

“Everybody tries to sell their project as the propulsion system of the future,” says Adderley.