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Success at building large amounts of inexpensive nanotubes opens the door for lighter, faster car frames; affordable space vehicles; and ultralightweight armor. Or on a smaller level, BNNTs could be used with pinpoint precision to attack cancer cells by sticking to tumors, absorbing neutrons from a targeted beam, and generating localized alpha radiation to kill the cancer. "This is the start of a revolution in materials," says Dennis Bushnell, a NASA engineer who has watched the work closely in the hopes of using BNNTs for space vehicles.

Now a NASA engineer has come up with a new way to fling satellites through space on mere grams of fuel, tens of times as efficiently as today’s best space probe thrusters.

Instead of using deuterium and tritium as the fuel stocks, the new motor extracts energy from boron fuel.