"We aren't building enough nuclear plants now to compensate for the future closing of the old ones."
Which is an intentional choice, arising from a combination of ennui, defeatism, and witch hunting. Those political movements seem to have run their course.
"Fusion research is blooming, but it didn't make much progress, particularly compared to the huge effort (see ITER)."
Most of the tokamak megaprojects were done to give academics a safe way to demonstrate activity. ITER is the plasma physics version of string theory. In my opinion, the real progress has come from small quiet projects involving vacuum physics and power electronics.
"'Space ore' simply can't happen unless you find the way to harvest the power from some magic ponies yet to discover."
It's metal, not ore. If you can lay your hands on asteroidal metal, you can turn it into useful articles with a blacksmith's forge. Fancy alloys and precious metals are more effort, but often easier than dealing with crappy terrestrial ores.
The magic pony is to cancel the failed Shuttle, yet another stagnant megaproject. And avoid replacing it with other doomed megaprojects. The barrier to space activity is heavy lift capability to get there at all. Once you can get above the atmosphere cheaply enough, the solar system is your oyster. (It's like Fed Ex. The capital investment to build Fed Ex is ludicrous, but once somebody has the balls to do it, entire industries rise up from nowhere to exploit it.)
> The barrier to space activity is heavy lift capability to get there at all.
Pipe dreaming. The barrier to space is the _tremendous_ amount of energy required to get anything to low-earth orbit, let alone getting raw material going back from Jupiter's vicinity. Even with 1000 times better technology (which won't arrive soon), your asteroid iron still will be costlier than platinum.
Nope. The energy cost is trivial. The cost of joules for a vacation to Europa is within upper middle class aspirations. It only costs so much because our lifters are hideously inefficient.
The reason rockets are so inefficient is that we don't know how to keep cracks from spreading through our structural materials, so we have to derate their strength by huge factors to get reliability. Nano- and micro-composite materials look like they will be able to vastly improve this situation (and indeed already are in the latest jetliners), and the rocket equation gives big big cost savings for weight savings. High strength materials are also good for rotovators and other semi-passive lifters.
Another big opportunity is to shift some of the propulsion to the ground. It should be straightforward to shine launch lasers up the tail of a standard rocket and reduce its propellant requirement by many percent, which the rocket equation then multiplies into a large cost savings. Exclusively laser launched vehicles are also possible but speculative at this point (they need visible light lasers to get range but those are still too inefficient). Most of the necessary technology exists or can easily be built. All we lack is the optimism to make the investment.
As for getting metal back, the asteroid belt is energetically close despite the distance. A small nuclear reactor and patience will do the job.
Which is an intentional choice, arising from a combination of ennui, defeatism, and witch hunting. Those political movements seem to have run their course.
"Fusion research is blooming, but it didn't make much progress, particularly compared to the huge effort (see ITER)."
Most of the tokamak megaprojects were done to give academics a safe way to demonstrate activity. ITER is the plasma physics version of string theory. In my opinion, the real progress has come from small quiet projects involving vacuum physics and power electronics.
"'Space ore' simply can't happen unless you find the way to harvest the power from some magic ponies yet to discover."
It's metal, not ore. If you can lay your hands on asteroidal metal, you can turn it into useful articles with a blacksmith's forge. Fancy alloys and precious metals are more effort, but often easier than dealing with crappy terrestrial ores.
The magic pony is to cancel the failed Shuttle, yet another stagnant megaproject. And avoid replacing it with other doomed megaprojects. The barrier to space activity is heavy lift capability to get there at all. Once you can get above the atmosphere cheaply enough, the solar system is your oyster. (It's like Fed Ex. The capital investment to build Fed Ex is ludicrous, but once somebody has the balls to do it, entire industries rise up from nowhere to exploit it.)