Loyal readers will recall my visit last year to the start-up company Pulsar Fusion, which is aiming to create a spacecraft propulsion system based on nuclear fusion. When I was there in October, the company’s founder Richard Dinan was preparing to test a plasma thruster system in a giant vacuum chamber.

Now, Pulsar says that it has “built and tested a miniature prototype of a plasma powered rocket thruster, that could more than double space flight speeds”. In a press release the company goes on to say, “A huge amount of energy is put into argon gas, the propellant, to produce a high temperature plasma similar to that found in a nuclear fusion reactor, before an electromagnetic field is used to shoot out the plasma at very high speeds”. Above is a video of the test.

There is a fantastic photo essay in The Guardian about a former Soviet weapons research facility on Armenia’s Mount Aragats that is now part of a global network of cosmic ray detectors. Despite being at an altitude of 3200 m and cut off from civilization for much of the winter by ferocious blizzards and numbing temperatures, the facility looks remarkably homey. Indeed, some of the buildings look like McMansions plucked out of some US suburb – with stained-glass windows, but no three-car garages!

The site also features the ruins of a half-built telescope observatory and is strewn with Soviet-era electronics.

“We’re above civilization,” says Gohar Hovhannisian. “The cosmic particles arrive clear and pure here since there’s nothing to disturb them.”