Mark of Ask Mark reports that because of Dr Bussard's winning the Outstanding Technology of the Year Award for 2006 and his widely reported Google talk the US Navy has decided to fund the final year of the his contract. (I contacted my Congress critter with no obvious result. However, maybe others had better results.)

That may be enough to get WB-7 and WB-8 funded. I hope his results from his new experiments will not be embargoed.

So far I have been unable to confirm this report. However, I have corresponded with Mark and from his e-mails he seems to be an OK guy.

Update: 19 April 2007 1200z

I found confirmation at Speculations 10 April 2007 post. There is no permalink for the post so I'm going to reproduce it here:

Greetings, future-watchers .... got some really interesting news about five minutes ago, straight from the man himself. Dr. Robert Bussard, of whom you may have heard, says that because of the publicity around his November 9th talk at Google and his International Academy of Science Outstanding Technology of the Year Award, the Navy has sent him a contract extension to continue his fusion research. It's two orders of magnitude below the $200 million Dr. Bussard says he needs to produce a full-scale 100mw system, but it's a start. If you're interested in helping out, see emc2fusion.org for more.

More details may be found in The Advent of Clean Nuclear Fusion: Superperformance Space Power and Propulsion, Dr. Bussard's contribution to the 57th International Astronautical Congress.

Come discuss this and other technology developments in The Expert Is In!

Cross Posted at Power and Control and at The Astute Bloggers