But that's not even the clever bit. The clever bit of Jordin's proposal is that the laser tracking/energizing system can be built modularly. You can build one prototype module that can launch one toy craft. Then you figure out how to mass produce it and build a whole bunch of these puppies that can lock onto and zap a much larger heat-exchanger carrying craft.
What you get is very cheap access to orbit without ungodly huge R&D and infrastructure costs up front.
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...
(In this case "ungodly huge" = price of a space elevator.)
I never said it would be trivial. There are two big differences, though. 1) The laser-launch craft wants to be hit. We can mount retro-reflectors on it, and it can transmit back helpful data. 2) The laser is going to be stationary, and the vehicle is going to be traveling on a known track.
and anyway it will be weapon technology.
This makes it much more likely that it will get funded and developed.
It's often said that to lock in a program, you need to create a class of people who might lose their jobs if it is shut down. These people are highly motivated and willing to go to great lengths to protect that program. In contrast, people afraid of tax increases or people who do or don't observe the benefits have little motivation to do anything.
The people afraid of losing their jobs protect that program from ever being cut, but they also prevent any radical improvements that might make them obsolete.
(In the old days, they also had to worry about Gordon Gekko style takeovers/restructuring. Not so much these days.)
I tend to oppose many government infrastructure efforts because the government has no incentive to do a realistic cost/benefit analysis of new projects. It is always in the legislator's and lobbyist's interest to start a new project, whether it be massive high speed rail lines, expensive green power installations, or large subsidies for classes of fuel and transportation that are uneconomical in the free market (hydrogen cars, corn ethanol). The only people paying a cost for new projects don't have a direct voice in the planning meetings.
The interstate highway system of the United States has long been the shining example of a "good" infrastructure project. But it has certainly subsidized the development of sprawling suburbs and a car-centric culture. Nowadays many expensive government infrastructure proposals (such as passenger rail) are aimed at mitigating the externalities from the earlier infrastructure projects. I wish we took a little more care at spending money wisely.
That dialog part of the article is hilarious. Too bad he forgot to add an "As you know, Bob, the government has spent $4 trillion..."
Then smack away, because the end of Anathem sucked ass.
Anyway that aside, it really brings up the old infrastructure problem -- Large investment in infrastructure is a two-edged sword, bringing both benefit and lock in, and when it comes time to change there is lots of debate. I think Neal either misses or avoids a big part of the argument here -- infrastructure is turned into the bad-guy and the good guy. People don't see the benefits it has brought for a myriad of reasons - they have internalized it, they are not in the class of society that directly gets money for it (and the general improved life isn't apparent because their neighbors are in the same boat), they are afraid of tax increases (or lack of tax cuts), they don't understand the current tech, and figure that "it has problems so anything else we do won't fix it either", it has broken society in the following ways...
Really all of this though is just setup. The way I see it, large scale tech and infrastructure projects are hard to get at and harder to revamp because they are just too easy to target with populist attacks from all sides. The issue is usually complex, but easy to attack with a simple disingenuous quip. Doubly so when the alternative is something that sort-of works, because then the quip doesn't even need the effort of disingenuety, just a mean spirited "they are trying to change the perfectly good stuff we have just to take it away from us, and ignoring everything else to fix"
I have no idea of the solutions we could offer to these types of scenarios, but I do think that somehow we need to find a way to look at these piles of infrastructure we have an find ways to make them better. To do that we need to get around the "infrastructure problem".