Discontinued as of 05/2021.
NFI was a project I started in October of 2020. The goal was to design and create a rocket propulsion system aimed at a more efficient way of travel for a 2nd-stage launch vehicle, to accomplish a long-distance journey in an optimal time (e.g. a journey to Jupiter). The project itself went no further than the conceptual design phase — the main limitation being a lack of education/knowledge to develop this system independently as intended. I'm showcasing this incomplete, archived project because exploring it allowed for a lot of self-reflection and reignited my interest in engineering, which led to me moving to a different location and pursuing higher education in an engineering discipline with an application in aerospace.
Background
The design had a few core and sub systems apart from the generic main components of a traditional propulsion system. After several iterations, the main influence of the concept revolved around reigniting an old idea and applying it with modern capabilities.
More specifically, it revolved around the "Bussard Ramjet," introduced in 1960 by physicist Robert Bussard. The idea was to (in theory) collect hydrogen gas in space during travel and use it as a fuel source simultaneously in transit, by deploying a large magnetic field to collect the gas as the vehicle continued. It was never implemented due to the lack of technology and our limited data of space in general, but the idea was continuously revisited over the years — each revisit hitting an implementation complication, primarily due to the lack of technology.