Anecdotally, ITER was the largest of few options for a fusion researcher to run their experiment in a new tokamak. Everybody wanted to put their work into it, and as more features were added, the more funding it sucked up, leaving less money for other experiments, leading to more people wanting to put their experiment into ITER. Here's a presentation [0] that goes over why SPARC, being so much smaller and simpler than ITER could be more likely to succeed.

[0] https://library.psfc.mit.edu/catalog/online_pubs/iap/iap2016...

This quote from the presentation summarizes it well:

“The more money that's involved, the less risk people want to take. The less risk people want to take, the more they put into their designs, to make sure their subsystem is super-reliable. The more things they put in, the more expensive the project gets. The more expensive it gets, the more instruments the scientists want to add, because the cost is getting so high that they're afraid there won't be another opportunity later on- they figure this is the last train out of town. So little by little, the spacecraft becomes gilded. And you have these bad dreams about a spacecraft so bulky and so heavy it won't get off the ground- never mind the overblown cost.”

“That boils down to the higher the cost, the more you want to protect your investment, so the more money you put into lowering your risk. It becomes a vicious cycle.” - Rob Manning, Chief spacecraft engineer, JPL

SPARC (as proposed this year, by CFS, which was founded in 2018) also has the benefit of 3 decades worth of advancement in materials science, computers, and other technologies over ITER, which was started sometime in the 1980's. Sometimes being first to market takes a long time and is very expensive because you first have to invent all of the components yourself.

SpaceX's advancement is impressive, but if NASA had never happened, I doubt SpaceX would even exist today.

SpaceX's main innovation was that they decided to build a rocket that wasn't optimized for performance or reliability, but cost. They were willing to bear huge development risks to create a new price category and capture latent demand for cheaper launches.

I'd say what SpaceX optimises for most is iteration time. They have benefited hugely from an iterative development pattern contrasted to the waterfall pattern of NASA et al. Time is your biggest cost.

I'd say yes and no. You most definitely have a point here as I agree that their model, or view, is different than NASA. However, if NASA had not happened, would even conceiving of a different model or target had happened? Not to mention just initial research into rocketry. It maybe could have happened without NASA, but probably with a severely higher initial investment.

The soviets had a very strong space program and arguably their rocket designs have had a significant impact on spacex…

I should have included them also. It is very much a "standing on giants." As many scientists and engineers from different countries and nationalities have made major contributions. I believe it was an early soviet scientist in the 20s who came up with the formula for how much fuel needed to be loaded into a rocket.

Super Heavy does look a lot more like an N1 than a Saturn V, after all.

For NASA science probes, this cost increase and risk averseness spiraling is called when missions become "Battlestar Galactica".

I thought this was some joke involving Bears and Beets. Turns out it is an actual thing [1].

>In 1992, Dan Goldin became the NASA Administrator. Goldin believed in a philosophy of Faster… better… cheaper—i.e., he thought NASA could do more with less. Hence, Goldin did not support the idea of having large EOS platforms in space and in fact once referred to them as “Battlestar Galactica.” He believed smaller, less expensive missions that could be built more quickly were the way to go and supported development of new programs that actually diverted funds from EOS.

[1] https://eospso.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/eo_pdfs/Perspect...

Arguably the Shuttle suffered from this too— instead of being a tightly focused space truck, it needed to be able to do ridiculous things like fly polar missions and grab Soviet spy satellites right out of the air.

Point of order: if the space shuttle were grabbing satellites out of the air, something has gone terribly wrong with both launching the satellite and the shuttle.

I think the idea was that early spy satellites would use film rather than digital transmission, so it would be at the very least necessary to potentially grab one's own satellites.

In any case, this exact question was asked here, and the top-rated response indicates that it's unlikely that the design requirement was ever meant to refer to grabbing an uncooperative payload:

https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/41741/was-the-spac...

I think the joke was that the satellite isn't supposed to be in the "air".

Parent was being overly pedantic in that satellites were likely to be grabbed out of space and not air.

This is also why it's exciting to see the huge drop in satellite launch costs driven by SpaceX. Your satellite design is going to be much different if you have a few chances to launch on a $1B rocket per year, vs launching it for $10M anytime. Rather than one complicated reliable one, you might make 10 simpler ones and buy extra flights to do repairs if necessary.

The first step to correction is awareness right? Lets turn this tanker of human behavior away from these pitfalls.

This is an amazing observation, and something I've seen in many realms.

Sounds like politics more than technological. Although I guess it is unavoidable.

Here's a render of the completed reactor: https://www.iter.org/doc/all/content/com/gallery/media/7%20-... Note human for size.

It's all completely bespoke scientific equipment hand made for this project only. The cryostat will be the largest stainless steel vacuum vessel ever made-- all welded by hand.

After welding, a substantial number of in-vessel components have to be installed by threading them through access ports, which is also quite a task: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pt70mO2nQac

Here's a similar picture for SPARC from wikipedia: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/74/SP...

It still need a lot of the (same) support infrastructure. Plus ARC will be bigger than SPARC.

That said building the first is a lot harder than scaling it up.

I believe SPARC is a magnet demo, so it won't have tritium breeding blankets like ITER. It also has a shorter pulse time, 10 seconds vs 1000.

(That's right. ITER, which will cost more than $65 billion and take decades to build, can't run continuously!)

Nor ever produce so much as one solitary erg to flash an LED.

You do seem to be going on quite the hatefest of Fusion, but continue to add nothing to the conversation, including sources of information. So how much energy is in an erg?

3000 ergs is enough to flash an LED.

When you have no turbine or any other means to extract power from a heat source, none gets extracted. Do you need a source for that?

That will become a level in an FPS game for sure.

Lol, I have the same though. They'll probably need to make the equipment a little sparser though, because it gets super crowded once everything is installed. Those cut-aways don't show all the detail.

Expensive because it's a custom built physics lab, not a commercial power plant. Slow because it's an international project. Not just that, but it also requires lots of infrastructure to be built and entire industries to develop in multiple countries, before it can be useful. ITER is massive, but it's also just a tip of the iceberg.

>It just doesn't strike me as obvious that reducing the major radius by a few meters would have such a huge impact on cost/timelines.

It would, easily. Past a certain size, production costs rise exponentially and require one-off tech.

Is it massive because it's 6 meters? Like - a 6 meter diamond would be "massive" - but a 6 meter boat isn't that impressive.

Or is it massive like the tokamak is a 6 meter engine to a 100 km collider? Like there's a ton of other stuff being built in a massive structure?

A 6 meter superconducting magnetic containment vessel is massive, as such things go. But ITER is also an entire facility built around the containment vessel.

The magnets are so large they had to build a factory on-site to put them together. If you can make the magnets small enough to transport from a centralized factory, that's a huge win.

If production costs rise exponentially with reactor size then the exponential power gain with size isn’t very impressive.

I have a pet theory that the major cause for cost/time overruns on large projects is the cost constraint itself. In other words, attempting to do things on too small of a budget results in the overall cost increasing, not decreasing. I suspect that there are a few main mechanisms for this:

1. As budget constraints tighten, the number of man-hours spent wrestling with bean counters (and/or waiting around with nothing to do until the bean counter wrestling completes) increases exponentially.

2. "Cheap solutions" often end up being unfit for purpose, and have to be reworked later at great expense.

3. Budget overruns lead to time overruns which lead to more budget overruns, ad infinitum.

Time has its own cost, especially multi-stage construction projects.

Being delayed imposes costs on downstream work, which must now be ready but in some kind of holding pattern, which imposes costs on work downstream of that work.

So a large part of throwing "Manhattan project" / excess funding (and the potential savings by just funding it that way from the start) is avoiding these delays, to the extent possible.

It costs +$200,000 to tackle some challenge in a critical piece? Sometimes it's cheaper just to pay.

Also, it’s a multi-national government funded program that was never intended to return a profit.

So there’s very little incentive to constrain costs.

The budget overruns are the whole point of the project. Any sort of apparent science or engineering goal is a smokescreen.

Citations? Or just idle theorizing?

It is the same process we see everywhere that massive cost overruns and unlimited delays manifest. Modern management methods can control cost and schedule where that is an actual goal. Where they don't demonstrates the actual goal. Every penny of cost overrun goes into some pocket. Smart management ensures many, many pocketholders are allied to keep the gravy train running.

Don't attribute to conspiracy what can be adiquately explained by beurocracy.

Millions of large buildings, and tens of thousands of huge ships, dams, and bridges are built on time and on budget.

The alternative would be that management cannot be judged on its results.

Some bridges, invariably urban, go massively over budget and schedule. Urban tunnels, routinely. Military procurement, routinely. Are people who manage those systematically dumber than the rest? Or do they have different measures of success?

What is common to those apparent failures is that they serve as a reliable, legal, long-term conduit from public funds to a multitude of private pockets. F-35 can never be cancelled, no matter what, because it has subcontractors in 48 states. The F-35 is a massive success to its backers: it secured monumental patronage. That it can actually take off and land, too, is a miracle.

An experimental fusion reactor is not a large building, or ship, or dam, or bridge. We've been building large buildings since the pyramids of Giza. We've been building large ships since before the Dreadnought. We've been building large dams since at least the Great Depression. The same goes for bridges. I don't think it's intellectually honest to compare budget and time overruns for fusion reactors to budget and time overruns for skyscrapers. You kind of say it without realizing it - "millions of large buildings", well yeah: if we have a lot of practice doing something - like building millions of large buildings - then wouldn't you expect us to do a better job of being on time and on budget than the handful of research efforts into the holy grail of energy production?

This is not a comparison of "budget and time overruns for fusion reactors to budget and time overruns for skyscrapers". It is a statement about management practices, regardless of the project.

The statement is that a blue-sky project such as a fusion system is easily recognized by people on the lookout for sources of unlimited money with no strings attached. When they get control of the project, the bulk of the money will not end up spent on the extremely difficult problems entailed. If the problems are as difficult as expected, handing the money over to people who benefit by not solving them will reliably fail to solve them.

We know with absolute certainty, already, that there is no "holy grail of energy production" at the end of it. The most favorable imaginable result is a system much more expensive to operate than a fission plant that produces no more power.

Or, Occam’s razor. A sufficiently complex engineering task can exist such that it fully taxes even international, multi-nation state-backed parallel capacity for engineering, and science.

This is already demonstrated by your own examples provided, just at a smaller scale.

If there were ever such a project to push against the capacity of our ability to do truly enormous, complex engineering, I’d say a massive, cutting-edge fusion reactor is as good a candidate as one could propose.

Moreover, the economic and educational stimulus these projects provide cannot be ignored when accounting for the indirect, long-tail returns this project, and those similar, provide.

Put another way: ostensibly, achieving net energy gain from fusion is the end of our near-term (energy) needs, conveniently breezing over the evolution and refinements of any system, as well as delivery and storage, but these are paths that are comparatively well mapped out. It then follows that, short of catastrophic losses prior to succeeding (which while not a given per se, seems more a function of time than of ability outright), any reasonable cost is worthwhile. Reasonable, in this context, meaning one that doesn’t bankrupt, or otherwise severely impact the participants in a negative fashion. Given the scale of these budgets vs. that of social welfare programs, military spending, etc. I don’t see that as an issue worth being concerned over. One can know the budget has been exceeded, without that also bringing down the house.

Ultimately, to an extent you’re asserting a false dichotomy. It can be true that there’s continued, substantial progress towards the stated goals of these projects, even if the budgets, horizons, and timelines aren’t to your taste. It can also be true that there’s waste, inefficiencies, and even (both legalised and otherwise) corruption. One does not preclude the other.

It doesn't matter what physics you get when none of the absolute fortune spent over decades ends up contributing toward a resulting source of commercially competitive power.

We know already that if the project achieves all of its projected goals, the result will be much more expensive than fission. We know already that if any power is ever generated, at any price, it can come no sooner than decades in the future.

It's just an absolutely giant construction project. The mass and volume of the construction goes as the cube of the major radius of the reactor. Back of the envelope, SPARC is (6/1.5)^3 = 64 times smaller than ITER. The construction budget for SPARC is ~$500M, so ITER being tens of billions is in line.

How do projects like LIGO ever get completed? I’m probably totally naive here, but I thought LIGO is physically larger and has many difficult constraints. The LHC comes to mind as well, and that absolutely dwarfs ITER in physical size. What’s the difference? Dealing with heat output? Superconductors are really hard maybe?

LIGO did take decades to construct, like the LHC. According to LIGO's wikipedia article, it was the most expensive project ever funded by the NSF in 1994.

LIGO's size is also deceptive, the legs are kilometers long but the design is an L with the important bit being to vibrationally isolate things, maintain dimensional stability, and maintain vacuum.

ITER is likely bigger in terms of volume of concrete or actual footprint.

Hmm, looks like ITER and LHC both use about the same amount of superconductor: around 500 tons.

[0]https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1018583 [1]https://www.iter.org/mach/Magnets

ITER is a victim of a process seen frequently in large public-works projects, but particularly those where no one understands what anything really should cost, and where there is no practical deadline for completion. It is worst when there is no expected utility when it is done.

We see it lately in the numerous military procurements (particularly the F-35 program), in NASA's SLS rocket, in California's bullet train to nowhere, and urban tunnels such as New York's 2nd Avenue subway extension. It is why nuke plants are invariably so expensive and late.

In a word, corruption.

Lately, this corruption has been arranged to be wholly legal, so there is no possibility of prosecution. The majority of the money spent is funneled into myriad private pockets without moving the project toward completion. Nobody involved, at the monetary level, has any desire for it ever to be completed, because that is when the gravy train stops.

Fusion projects represent the worst case of this phenomenon. Nobody knows what it should cost, and nobody in control of spending wants it over with, ever.

The chance that anything of any practical use could come out at the end was openly foreclosed before it ever started: it was never promised to produce any electrical power, and no turbines, or space for any, appear in any site plan.

Any sort of practically useful Tokamak plant would need to be overwhelmingly bigger and more expensive than ITER, and could never come anywhere near producing commercially competitive power, so the project is a known dead end, to be milked until it is finally cancelled in shame.

What is tragic is that each euro diverted to this boondoggle brings climate disaster terrifyingly closer.

That's some hating BS right there. ITER might fail to produce economically viable fusion energy, but it certainly won't fail to produce a massive amount of scientific and engineering innovation.

The sole fact that such a scientific undertaking can be done internationally, over decades, is a great thing considering the global problems we face.

Yes, ITER doesn't follow the USA economic ideology of "much", "cheap", and "now", but the world doesn't consist only of the USA and not everything works well with that ideology.

ITER is not a PV or battery factory. It is more like the ISS.

ISS is an apt comparison. Its apparent purpose while the Shuttle was flying was to be a place the Shuttle could get to. What it is for now is anybody's guess. In just a few years it will be a celestial light show, somewhere.

I have no doubt that plasma fluid physicists will learn a great deal from trying to get ITER lit up. Just handed the money, they could have learned a thousand times more, and maybe even achieved practical D/H-3 fusion propulsion for spacecraft. But that will not happen at ITER.

"Just handed the money", my ass. Did you ever work in science? How to you even think that money should be distributed in scientific institutions? Everyone gets a share based on ... what? Their degree? Number of publications? Consensus by committee?

And for comparison, look what the ISS has brought us commercially: We have a fully commercial manned spaceflight planned for next week. That is a massive achievement without even considering all the scientific work on the station.

Handing 99% of the money to contractors for what will in short order be thousands of tons of radioactive slag contributes minimally to actual research. The developers of the overwhelmingly more practical FRC reactor are left to get by on scraps. Elsewhere in science, money is, in fact, being "granted" directly to scientists. This has gone on since long before you were born.

All of the "scientific work on" ISS is done with crew literally pushing an "on" button on each bit of automated equipment running it. Experiments are forbidden to involve more interaction, and also forbidden to operate without that "on" button, so the crew has something, anything to do.

Commercial manned spaceflight could better have been worked without ISS. ISS's role was nothing more than a place to take them. Plus, a huge money sink on its own. It will soon fall out of the sky, and with any luck not hurt anybody where it crashes down.

> All of the "scientific work on" ISS is done with crew literally pushing an "on" button

Why is this relevant?

I assume he means that the crew was superfluous because the "on" button could be pushed remotely or automated at a fraction of the cost of sending people to space.

This sounds like a whole lot of speculation to me. Can you cite actual sources and documents that prove it?

You write like someone unfamiliar with the history of the other projects cited. Copious materials are readily found online. Read up on them. Try to identify any reason to imagine ITER is different. I will wait.

Hey, that's not fair, there were many people "working" on the 2nd avenue tunnel who were never there. There's still illegal corruption!

Actually you can scale magnetic field stength or size to produce more power. SPARC (and later ARC) aims for the former with modern superconductor tech and is on track to potentially produce energy at Q~=11 by 2025.

I don't doubt it will produce plenty of of fast neutrons. Producing useful energy without destroying the most expensive parts of your reactor in the process is a whole other project. Doing it anywhere nearly as cheaply as overwhelmingly simpler systems whose costs are still in free fall is another, probably impossible project.

Margin?

Akin's law of spacecraft #29 "To get an accurate estimate of final program requirements, multiply the initial time estimates by pi, and slide the decimal point on the cost estimates one place to the right."

Think cubically!

A 6m device occupies 666 (say) --216 m^3

a 10m device occupies 10 10 6 (say) -- 600 m^3

The scale of volume means that you have to build a much bigger facility to put it in (in order for the electronics to be kept dry and for people to be able to get around it to keep birds off it and things.

But worse - the weight. Concrete is 2400kg m ^3 so the small device might weigh 518 tonnes, but the bigger device is 1440 tonnes, so moving parts of it round becomes 3 * harder, the floors have to be 3* stronger, the supply chain has to be 3* better.

And then time - 3* scale, 3* engineering challenge -> many times more time to deliver, many more $$$ -> risk -> planning -> admin... the less capital at risk the less it's worth spending on avoiding the risk.. the less the overhead of the project is.

FWIW ITER is a science experiment - it's designed to find out more about fusion and that data will be very valuable for future reactor designs.