Comment Re:This is a great example. (Score 1) 144
If you waited for private entrepreneurs to do fusion, you might well wait forever, even with payoffs with a dozen digits or so.
Maybe, but the other possibility is that the model has always been wrong.
It was always assumed, "we're going to put thing n into space" - how much is that going to cost?
When the question instead became, "we're going to put things into space for $50M - how are we going to do that?" a whole new engineering methodology unfolded.
I've spent time at a plasma physics lab - they're amazing, and everything inside is amazing, and massive, and expensive. The scale of some of the things is enough to make a nerd giddy.
But maybe it's not the right approach to actually solving the problem. I'll forgo the cynicism and not assert that it was the right approach for getting lots of grant money over the years, because fusion is one of the three key technologies of the 21st century's technological revolution (genetic engineering and AI being the other two breakthroughs about to happen; computing is just evolutionary at this point).