The National Compact Stellarator Experiment (NCSX) is a plasma confinement experiment that was being conducted at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. First plasma was scheduled to take place in July 2009. It is a variation of the stellarator concept, with a much lower aspect ratio than a typical stellarator. NCSX would have been one of the first fusion experiments to use massively parallel computing to find the optimal shape for the reactor vessel; one of the advantages of correctly-designed stellarators is that the confined plasma is passively stable when a steady magnetic field is applied, whereas tokamaks require an array of active control strategies to stabilize the plasma, even under a constant magnetic field. Up to 12MW of auxiliary heating power would have been available to the