A British venture funded by the UK Space Agency, Pulsar Fusion, introduced Sunbird, a space rocket concept designed to meet, dock with, and rapidly transport spacecraft in orbit using nuclear fusion. Richard Dinan, the founder and CEO of Pulsar, stated that “Performing fusion on Earth is not very natural. Fusion does not want to work in the atmosphere. Space is a much more logical and reasonable place to do fusion because fusion already wants to happen there.” According to a report by CNN International, Sunbird is currently in the early stages of construction with extraordinary engineering challenges to overcome, but Pulsar hopes to achieve the first fusion in orbit by 2027. If the rocket becomes operational one day, it could halve the journey time for a potential mission to Mars. Dinan explained that Sunbirds would function similar to city bikes in docking stations. “We’ll launch them into space, they’ll have a charging station to dock, and then they’ll rendezvous with your ship,” Dinan said. “You turn off your inefficient chemical engines and use nuclear fusion for most of your journey. Ideally, you would have a station somewhere near Mars and a station in low Earth orbit, and the Sunbirds would just go back and forth.”