You want to free up resources for either one? Start with global military spending and the financial sector. Both have their place and both have grown far beyond it.
One can project from SpaceX's launch history that as the commercialization of space intensifies, this figure is going to continue to grow exponentially
Financially and ecologically this is not worse than manufacturing products in China and shipping them all over the world, or usual stuff like tourism, cloud computing etc.
I would argue that Starship is even more ecological than the other rockets, as it requires a cleaner fuel than Falcon (methane vs kerosene) and should be fully reusable (i.e. no tossing the rocket in the ocean and hoping it will sink).
If we manage to bootstrap space manufacturing, benefits for ecology, biology and material science are also self-evident.
And yet nothing in any response so far counters my claim that capital expenditure on space projects will likely increase exponentially. The only claim I made, and the one I was downvoted for.
> I would argue that Starship is even more ecological than the other rockets
Methalox combusts to CO2. As the burgeoning space industry scales up exponentially, so will the emissions.
https://everydayastronaut.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Roc...
> If we manage to bootstrap space manufacturing, benefits for ecology, biology and material science are also self-evident.
Not 100% self-evident. Apart from how infeasible this is from the outset, once deployed at scale it would require transporting millions of tons of goods and raw materials back and forth against the gravity of the earth.
Not my domain, but I'm not sure there's a combustible fuel that could have the energy density to do this and not pollute the atmosphere (happy to be corrected on this). It seems we need to find a completely new means of propulsion (or offsetting with carbon capture) before we could have a green space industry.
Methane can be manufactured to be carbon neutral. The cost is prohibitive for everyday on the ground energy use but not so for rocket launches, since fuel is such a tiny portion of the cost of a flight.
Musk has mentioned the possibility of doing this.
Space elevators would be a cool solution, but they are in the realm of science fiction for now. So deploying at least some carbon capture solutions before space industry begins to scale actively is a good idea
I wasn't making an argument against companies making a lot of money. I was merely pointing out that the commercialization will be sinking capital investment far greater than just 2 billion, contrary to the poster's claim. I don't speak of the counterfactual, i.e., where that excess money would go otherwise, but I do share the OP's lament that we should be trying to fix problems on Earth. If Space tech can help in some way, I'm all for that.
> spending more on something that drives technological advancement is a good thing
Technologies are amoral. Whether or not the advancement or deployment of any particular technology is a 'good thing' is a matter of subjectivity.
First of all, just because the trend is exponential now doesn't mean it always will be. That's silly.
Second of all, the number of launches may be increasing at that rate because the launches have been made exponentially cheaper - why don't we look at % of GDP being put into space flight? I bet it would be flat or trending down.
Am I missing something here? I just don't think your implicit concerns are well-founded.
Well, I made no such argument, the GGP did, and I'll quote:
> Look at the numbers. SpaceX is doing it’s thing for a few billion a year. That’s chump change compared to the money being spent on, let’s say professional basketball.
... but I think if the poster wants to make the argument about relative costs they should at least make a fair assessment.
> First of all, just because the trend is exponential now doesn't mean it always will be. That's silly.
Silly why? Silly as the amount of processors that are sold every year?[0] How would a 'wealth creating' technology reaching economies of scale with a variety of use-cases not continue to grow? It is possible there's some sort of saturation point... but I can only see space industry as something that will spur it's own demand by creating industries that never existed before.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/266973/global-semiconduc...
> Second of all, the number of launches may be increasing at that rate because the launches have been made exponentially cheaper - why don't we look at % of GDP being put into space flight? I bet it would be flat or trending down.
And I was wondering if someone would make this argument, because it is flawed. Even if costs do 'reduce exponentially' they are reducing towards a lower limit, not to zero. At some point the cost reductions per year will start to become insignificant, much in the same way that regular flight isn't becoming exponentially more economical every year. So after the low-hanging fruit has been tackled (e.g., rocket re-use, mass production), the number of launches will correlate pretty well with costs, especially now that a whole bunch of use cases now become profitable.
> Well, I made no such argument, the GGP did, and I'll quote:
You are talking in other posts about how no one is able to rebut you, but then when I try to restate your argument so I can rebut it, you refuse to engage and just say "I'm not making an argument." Help me out here, I'm trying to engage in good faith.
> > First of all, just because the trend is exponential now doesn't mean it always will be. That's silly.
> Silly why? Silly as the amount of processors that are sold every year?
Exponential growth never goes forever. Not in nature, not in economics, not in physics, not anywhere. It is limited by the available resources. You seem to be arguing that space flight will continue to grow exponentially, consuming all the resources required to sustain that growth, unless we stop it right now, or very soon. I think that is a silly argument.
You brought up processor sales as an example, but why not consider processor transistor density? That's something that was growing exponentially for a long time (Moore's law), but has since fallen off. We're putting lots of resources into processors, but only as much as it makes economic sense to do so. Why would space flight be any different?
> Even if costs do 'reduce exponentially' they are reducing towards a lower limit, not to zero.
Of course! But the argument isn't that the cost of space flight will somehow reach zero, the argument is that we aren't spending that much on space flight right now, we don't seem to be increasing our spending on it, and we're still getting benefits from cheaper launches, so why would we want to stop it?
> especially now that a whole bunch of use cases now become profitable
I think that looking at the profitability of use cases of space flight really only strengthens my argument, and weakens the one I think you're making.
The argument, nothing more, nothing less:
> One can project from SpaceX's launch history that as the commercialization of space intensifies, this figure is going to continue to grow exponentially
I have made further arguments, but this is the one that is downvoted. I imagine most of the people that downvoted were Elon stans, but what's funny is that I doubt Elon himself would disagree with this statement. He has made exactly this kind of superlinear growth with Tesla, his battery production, and I'm certain he has the same ambition for SpaceX.
> You seem to be arguing that space flight will continue to grow exponentially, consuming all the resources required to sustain that growth, unless we stop it right now, or very soon, unless we stop it right now, or very soon
Once again, I have never made this point. I am in sympathy with directing attention and capital to problems with earth, but I reserve that as my opinion and beyond this discussion.
Allow me to restate my claim so that we're both certain:
The estimate that capital expenditure for SpaceX's space projects is 2 billion per year is short-sighted, and maybe a little disingenuous, given that that figure will grow exponentially in the longer term.
It's this exponential growth we're arguing about, whether it will be 'eventually drawing from other, more worthy projects' is a morality question I did not pose. Agreed?
> It is limited by the available resources
Err, yes. I'm not saying growth goes forever, obviously, but by the time the space industry (on earth) saturates, spending on space will be many orders of magnitude more. Let alone that acquisition of raw materials and manufacturing for space can continue off earth, so I don't think depletion of resources are a problem in the very long term.
> but why not consider processor transistor density?
Because it's completely orthogonal to my point. I'm not talking about efficiencies, I'm talking about gross spending on the technology. Full stop.
> we don't seem to be increasing our spending on it
But we will be increasing this spending year-on-year, likely at an exponential rate. You disagree with this, but it seems we're both speculating. Though for at least my speculation, the current trend, and history, broadly agrees.
> I think that looking at the profitability of use cases of space flight really only strengthens my argument, and weakens the one I think you're making.
The one I wasn't making. But I'm not sure about the argument you're making? If SpaceX is making exponentially more profit, capital expenditure on commercial space ventures must be increasing. If there's more profit, it's because someone, somewhere, is fronting up the cash.
Could this money be better allocated in order to solve Earth's problems? Probably. Might space tech in some way help Earth anyway? Maybe. But will the spending for a new frontier of wealth increase exponentially in the medium to long term? Barring some major catastrophe or extinction event, it's inevitable.
Meanwhile we have more oil and gas reserves now than ever. We're not running out of anything, not really. But the malthusians want to reduce population by 16x. They really do. It's crazy.
Now, to answer your question... Substitute any topic into "how is it that so many educated, intelligent people seem to think that we...". The answer is pretty simple: we each don't know everything, in fact we know very little (and about many many things nothing really), and we are very (extremely!) susceptible to peer pressure, and we like to go with the flow, and we accept authority blindly where we know little, and so on.
It's a real problem. We just don't teach people how to think about what they know little about. Epistemology is hard enough, but we need people to do more than reason about what they know and how they know it and what they might not know and all that. We need people to have an idea of how to think about the stuff they know little about that they don't even want to know about -- stuff that -no matter how little they care for the details of- is super topical and where getting the answers collectively wrong could be disastrous.
This seems pretty extreme, but thank you for bringing the concept of Malthusianism ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism ) to my attention. While i'm not convinced that it's likely to be the end of humanity (but rather the results of thousands of compounding factors), the irresponsibility in regards to unrestrained consumerism is something that i see every day, and there is certainly some merit to those arguments in my eyes because of this.
> The answer is pretty simple: we each don't know everything, in fact we know very little (and about many many things nothing really), and we are very (extremely!) susceptible to peer pressure, and we like to go with the flow, and we accept authority blindly where we know little, and so on.
This, however, i'm not entirely sure about. Short of militant disregard for climate change or even the idea that human actions are capable of changing it in the first place, the viewpoints that i've personally seen expressed are more in the direction of feeling powerless and somewhat depressed about the state of things. Instead of outright ignorance, most of the people that i've talked with believe that the governments have largely failed them and the mechanisms of representation that should be in place are only so as far as looks are concerned. For example, lobbying and corporate interests are prioritized, as well as industry development is prioritized over sustainability. In the end, it feels like maximizing profit margins takes precedence over sustainable progress and long term advancement.
Edit: Climate change and all that is just one example, but the fact that many feel powerless even if they aware of what's going on stands for other things as well.
And most of those people that i've talked with have felt like there's little to nothing that they can individually do, seeing as a significant portion of the society is more than happy to live a hedonistic lifestyle that's rooted in consumption. That doesn't mean that we need to live in some dystopian nightmare either, but i'd argue that it's definitely a worthy goal to make the environment thrive first and to focus on a more utilitarian way of life - meat dishes as something to enjoy rather than to have with every meal, a new phone every 5 years instead of every single year, energy efficient hardware (like Athlon 200GEs) for homelabs instead of the latest Threadripper CPUs (unless absolutely necessary), a used but dependable car instead of a new one and so on. And, of course, supporting local and small businesses, as well as trying your own hand at some of that stuff - going out to hunt game, drag it back home, skin it and cook it (if nothing else, that really makes you appreciate the meat you're eating), or even just simpler things like growing your own tomatoes and cucumbers (which are absolutely delicious), where possible.
If everyone lived at least a bit more like that, we'd have even more breathing room in regards to the environment, in regards to resource usage etc., which feels like a good thing no matter how you look at it. Of course, that's probably also unrealistic as far as expectations go.
The reason is that it's thought from a perspective of the global north, that assumes we just need to restrict a little to achieve a lot. That is not going to solve the global climate crisis.
The simple reason is that there are 7 billion people who are not living in the rich countries. These people have the right to access resources as much as the people born in rich countries.
Consuming 20% less carbon in the west will not offset the increased consumption in the rest of the world.
Every gallon of oil that can be produced at a reasonable price will be consumed. If Europe and the US switched to all electric cars tomorrow, the rest of the world would still consume the oil, especially at a lower price than now (because the US and Europe are no longer conusming it).
There are things we could do right now, without significant impact to our lifestyle. I just learned, that over 3% of climate emissions are crop burning. 2% is deforestation. We could literally stop this with the signing of a bill. The US and the EU agree to tax imports from crop burning countries at a high rate. It will drive up prices of Brazilian beef and Indonesian palm oil a little, but of little impact to the consumer.
Cement is another 3%, which could be solved with CO2 neutral cement. Electric trucks will be a game changer once they are cheaper to run than Gas trucks. And yes nuclear is something we can't stop developing.
When I argue for a tech forward approach than not because I'm a tech bro that believes science solves all problems, but because I strongly believe reductions are not gonna work. If we rely on consumption reductions we are truly screwed.
That may be, but Occam's razor suggests that it would be a good idea to ask why that still hasn't been done. Surely there are some reason why such obvious and useful things still haven't been implemented, right? I may be wrong, but i'd like to suggest that there are certain interest groups behind all of that, for whom such changes would be bad for business.
Also, what makes you think that both approaches couldn't be utilized? Use less resources, increase taxes to compensate the drop in prices that would otherwise follow and gradually stop subsidizing things like meat production, at least to the degree where the price at stores is artificially lowered. At the same time, attempt to subsidize wind, sun, geothermal, nuclear and other forms of getting electricity and see whether things are better or worse in 50 years.
Those approaches are not mutually exclusive, as long as you have plenty of legislative bodies on your side. Sadly, we don't and probably won't, at least until a generational shift takes place. As Planck's principle states: "Science progresses one funeral at a time", which could be attributed to social policies to some degree as well.
Of course, in regards to electric vehicles, one also has to consider the necessary infrastructure to support them and what's the CO2 cost of creating their batteries in the first place. For a while, and certainly in some geographical settings, hybrid vehicles could also be good for a gradual transition.
Clearly there are, we want cheaper Brazilian beef, Indonesian palm oil, Cambodian agricultural products. But let's say we tax imports from countries that don't clamp down on crop burning, I doubt the average consumer would feel any difference. The last flood in Germany is estimated to cost 10 billion Euro. Overall the benefit would outweigh the cost.
>Also, what makes you think that both approaches couldn't be utilized? Use less resources, increase taxes to compensate the drop in prices that would otherwise follow and gradually stop subsidizing things like meat production, at least to the degree where the price at stores is artificially lowered. At the same time, attempt to subsidize wind, sun, geothermal, nuclear and other forms of getting electricity and see whether things are better or worse in 50 years.
I think using less resources can certainly help but to a degree that it almost doesn't matter. Especially if it's just about irrelevant stand-ins. For example the EU will forbid the sale of fossil fuel motorbikes in 2035. This is about something that has an effect on 0.1% of the carbon emission of a single economic area. And with motorcycles the benefits are way way less than cars as they are driven a lot less than cars and the increased CO2 of production takes years to result in CO2 reductions of the lifetime. So a whole industry is forced to build new factories develop new models for the smallest of the small reductions, while the big stuff is left on the table. Or SUV's. SUV owners are demonized, while millions of tons of CO2 are emitted shipping Chinese made goods around the globe.
> Those approaches are not mutually exclusive, as long as you have plenty of legislative bodies on your side. Sadly, we don't and probably won't, at least until a generational shift takes place. As Planck's principle states: "Science progresses one funeral at a time", which could be attributed to social policies to some degree as well.
Agreed and this is what I want to achieve. A science driven approach not one of pandering to envy and the industry groups.
> This seems pretty extreme
Well, yes, that's because it is. But some really do want that. See The Georgia Guidestones for more information.
Even a European level of resource usage (roughly half that of US, last I checked) would be hard to achieve for the entire world pop.
A good example is river health. We can provide more meat with high density grazing. But the waste products have to go somewhere, so the farmers spread them across their fields. Now when it rains, these run into the rivers and we get algae bloom. Majority of rivers in UK are now dying, for example.
Have we discovered a sustainable way of producing more meat in less space? I hope so. But perhaps we are destroying natural systems whose benefit to us has not been properly quantified, in a way that will be extremely difficult to reverse.
Modern agriculture has enabled us to support a larger world population with less labour and less space, but can we continue as we are for another 50 years?
I keep pointing to the fact that negative population growth is already baked in to the world's population pyramid, and responders conveniently continue to ignore that fact.
We DO NOT have to "continue as we are for another 50 years". In 50 years there will be desperation to increase fertility rates.
> But environmental destruction is way up.
> A good example is river health.
Demonstrably false in the U.S. In the U.S. in the 30s river fires were so common that they weren't notable. By 1947 they were so rare that a river fire graced the cover of Time magazine to get people outraged (and succeeded, and good thing too because that was part of a process that led Americans to care about their environment). U.S. rivers are much cleaner than they used to be. Sure, there are some terrible stories still (e.g., the Hudson river has some terrible pollutants now-thankfully-mostly-buried under sediment).
I don't know what's the case in the UK, but I would be surprised if the state of the UK's rivers today was worse than 50 years ago, and shocked to my core if it was worse than 100 years ago.
If the population size goes down but consumption per person goes up by an equivalent amount (easy to imagine when US citizen emits 5x carbon of average citizen of many other countries) we have the same problem.
If things are so rosy environmentally, why are so many species going extinct due to habitat loss?
If population has gone up, so food needs have gone up, and total land under agriculture has gone down, and the planet has greened... that means that farming efficiency has increased by so more than enough to feed the planet's people that it's not profitable to keep so much land under agriculture, and most of the land that is no longer under agriculture didn't get paved over -- it's forest now.
As long as the population increases, Malthus is right. There is going to be some ultimate carrying capacity at some point. Ultimate amount of energy we can harness. It's just a question when. Certainly before our energy consumption is enough to literally boil the oceans.
Plug in different growth rates and the answer could range from tens of years to hundreds of millions of years!
Its not actually practically relevant and every-time people used it as an argument it has been proven in terms of practical impact.
Wrong. As long as population growth remains positive without end in sight, Malthus right.
However, THE END OF POSITIVE POPULATION GROWTH IS IN SIGHT.
I mean, I said so in the comment you responded to, and you conveniently ignored it. Instead you went right for the Malthusian fearmongering talking points. "It's just a question of when" -- no, no it's not, not if population plateaus and then shrinks (negative population growth for a while is practically baked in now into the world's demographics).
> Plug in different growth rates and the answer could range from tens of years to hundreds of millions of years!
Why thank you. Hundreds of millions of years is more than there is time for life on this planet. Without our help, each successive glacial period was ending with CO2 lower than the end of the previous glacial period, and plants starve below certain levels (I think it's 150ppm for one kind of photosynthesis, lower for another) and was going to end up below those levels soon enough. Now, thanks to HUMANS life on Earth has millions more years in it because we've put a little bit of the Earth's sequestered carbon back into the carbon cycle.
Climate change also exists. So do resource limits.
Something that doesn't exist is the science of living outside of an existing planetary ecosystem.
Do some research on how much is understood about creating a stable ecosystem out of sand, metal ore, and water. You'll find it's a good approximation to zero.
Flag wavers think it's all about building giant rockets, planting a flag - and boom. Colony! Asteroid mining! Etc!
The reality couldn't be more different. Giant rockets are barely the loading screen. Feeding humans, dealing with waste products without choking on them, growing or synthesising essential nutrients, building systems that do all of this in a stable self-sustaining way - these are all beyond hard.
And that's not even getting into psychology and politics.
So until that changes, running your own planet - the one you got for free, and which was working fine already - as if you're trying to test it to destruction to find out just how stable it really is, is an unbelievably dumb thing to do.
Nobody actually interested in space believes this.
> So until that changes
It wont change unless you try to change it.
I seem to remember some guy saying something about that.
We’ve never let the fact that something doesn’t exist yet stop us. We are a species of inventors. We didn’t stay huddled naked in caves because they work and we got them for free. We aren’t meant to be like the rest of the ecosystem that mutely accepts its fate. We know we can die but we also reject the natural order of succumbing to predation, famine, disease and exposure. This planet is a cradle that we cannot lie in forever. Some day it will be dust and we will have to learn to walk amongst the stars.
Indeed, when we lived in caves, there were only so many of them. We totally blew past the cave sustainability model thousands of years ago.
I'm not saying we should be cavalier about pushing current limits, but I also wouldn't be cavalier about doing things to hurt today's humans due to fears that are not well founded (because, again, negative population growth is now baked in to the world population pyramid, so that soon we won't be pushing the planet's limits any longer).
What constitutes as 'pushing limits' depends on the kind of planet that is considered tolerable. For many conservation-minded people, pushing the limits happened well before 7 billion.
A population shrinking to a quarter of it's size is only considered undesirable to some because the economy doesn't factor in the externalities of having a large population - e.g., climate change, reduced access to nature, increased stress, polluted environment, species loss, food chain collapse. The solution is to no longer permit these to be externalities, and I don't see that happening without government intervention on a global scale.
As for anyone concerned about an ageing population, within the next few decades human labor shortages will be solved with automation - to the point that there will be a shrinking job market. As for caring for the elderly, they will have access to new mobility technology, and life extension - at first expensive, but then trickling down to poorer people before 2 generations.
Note that unstated in the quoted text is a strong assumption or implication that we are "trying to test [the planet] to destruction ..." with our 8bn people. It's hard escape a soupçon that when someone says or implies that, they really resent most of that 8bn people, maybe to the point where they'd be ecstatic if they got wiped out. I'm not saying you do, but it's a pretty gross feeling I get when I see that line of argument.
And look, if fertility rates for the whole world were 8 and trending upwards with the current 8bn, then I think I would be panicking myself, and agreeing with you, and predicting ecological disaster, terrible wars, etc. But we're not.
Almost throughout the entire world, fertility rates have crashed below replacement rate. Some cases are fairly surprising, like Iran's, which had a fertility rate of 8 in 1978 and has been below replacement rate for a number of years.
The reasons for fertility rates spiking in the 20th century and then dropping so far so fast are very, very well understood. It even used to be fashionable to talk about that around here, but not now -- now the Malthusian narrative seems to be in full swing without regard to the actual facts of global population pyramid (why??):
- enormous technological and medical advances lowered child mortality rates and increased life expectancy very quickly in the 20th century
- but it took time for the number of children people had in suddenly wealthy countries to drop to match the new reality
- political changes (and possibly pushing even remotely close to the planet's carrying capacity) have caused economic pressures that have driven young people to reduce their fertility, postpone family formation, or forgo family formation altogether
- those add up to us now being about to enter a negative population growth regime
For an example of political changes that have caused such pressures see Social Security and programs like it around the world. Because those programs make caring for the current generation of retirees the burden of the current generations of workers, that puts a not-neglible economic pressure on the working generations, and as fertility rates drop, that pressure increases -- a vicious (or perhaps virtuous, if you like) cycle.
Trees—like Dominican mahogany grow really slowly and now there are so few of them we have basically run out. I can name several other examples—most notably Guayacan.
There is a bunch of scarcity and destruction. I’m pretty sure we can fix them—but for the trees and the animals it’s unlikely that I get to experience them as was so in previous lifetimes.
It’s a shame we couldn’t manage them sustainably previously.
The environment is cleanest and best in richer countries because rich people can afford to care about it. That's right, poor people who worry about where their next meal is going to come from could not care less about the environment.
So if you want the 8bn people of this planet to care for it, we have to make them richer than they are.
Rocket engines, hypersonic vehicles, and orbital rockets have a dual use for missile technology ( both conventional and nuclear )
Considering we don't even have fission rockets or airplanes in normal use, making a fusion powerplant that is light enough to get off the ground seems very far fetched.
Even if we eventually use fusion for travel beyond earth orbit, I'd bet chemical rockets would still be in use.
Don't we already have thrusters that are useful in space, but completely unable to support themselves against 1G and so they can't lift off from the ground?
I feel like I've read something that said fusion power would fall in the same category.
Yes. For example ion thrusters have specific impulse that is like an order of magnitude or two (or three?) better than chemical rockets, but they can't lift anything out of the atmosphere.
> I feel like I've read something that said fusion power would fall in the same category.
Sorry I have no idea about that.
As absurd as it sounds nuclear powered aircraft engines are a thing.[1] They have also been proposed for spacecraft, Scott Manley does a great video talking about nuclear rocket engines[2].
Safety is a very valid concern for any supersized airborne vehicle but especially a nuclear powered one! However, this is one department where scale in itself brings it's own benefits. The volume increases faster than the surface area so you could have a hull far thicker than that of many naval ships while still having a truly vast interior volume. Not needing to ever land also reduces avenues for sabatoge and presumably the craft's interior itself would be heavily compartmentalized. You can also optimise your hull to deal with a narrow air pressure range which you cannot do with normal craft which need to be able to handle a wide range from ground level to the stratospheric.
Fusion still shares the same fundumental problem that chemical rockets or even more advanced options like blackhole or antimatter drives face - the rocket equation. We need to use near term reusable launch vehicles like the Starship to help set up the required launch assist structures that would make genuine mass transit of people and cargo into orbit possible.
Things like skyhooks, lofstroom loops, and eventually orbital rings that would allow people to ride trains or cable cars from an earth city straight into orbit for the same price range as intercity travel today. Needless to say, that is not going to happen until there is enough of an industry up there to justify the large upfront costs of such megaprojects (especially the orbital ring) so the Starship is our best near term hope of getting us up to that point.
Note that none of these projects require advanced materials or new technologies (as opposed to the space elevator that is likely to remain science fiction when it comes to dealing with a body with the gravity well of earth anyway), they're just massive engineering projects.
"Today’s best chemical rockets produce propellant exhaust velocities up to 4.5 km/s. Fission (nuclear thermal) rocket engines could roughly double that, to about 8.5 km/s. A working nuclear fusion core producing thrust through direct exhaust of hot plasma, could readily generate up to ~1000 km/s exhaust velocities" - https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10894-015-0034-1
Likely necessary for advanced space flight. Likely necessary to allow for "clean energy" on earth. Unlike advances to flamethrowers.
They only come into their own once they are already in space or in orbit which returns us to the problem that we need to have launch assist infrastructure that can deal with that first step without resorting to those "flamethrowers" as you call them.
It's also not true at all that fusion is necessary to allow for clean energy (even ignoring that many of the near term fusion reactor designs still need to have radiation shielding to deal with dangerous neutron emissions). We could use a combination of renewable sources and nuclear fission to deal with the energy crisis now and then utilise fusion once it's finally matured to the point of usefulness. Indeed, we could use that orbital infrastructure to help construct a planetary cloud of solar collectors that can operate 24/7 and beam that energy down via microwave rectiner technology that is already capable of achieving greater than 85% energy conversion (keep in mind that we lose far more energy simply from the diffusion of sunlight through the atmosphere). This approach not only can power the earth but any off earth colonisation prospects with line of sight with our planetary cloud - without needing to haul the likely massive early generation fusion reactors.
Neither is fusion necessary for advanced space travel. It would be very useful but chiefly for travel to under-developed sectors of the solar system. solar reflectors scaled up enough can be used to speed up and slow down entire fleets of ships with far higher potential top speeds than even antimatter drives permit (since there is no requirement to have onboard propellant). They also double as handy point defense systems for dealing with both debris and ships that are attempting to turn themselves into relativistic kill missiles - remember that there is no such thing as an unarmed space ship, they are all potential weapons of mass destruction, especially once we reach the state where we have fusion drive powered ones.
And orbital infrastructure... Sounds impractical. Even if somehow possible, it'd be risky to have a dependency on such infrastructure. Fragile and susceptible to so many risks.
Remember that you do not need to move all of this mass off anywhere once in place so you build it like a building, not a ship that needs to be optimised for low mass and acceleration.
You do not build these flimsy since even the modest ones will have a big upfront cost and the better equipped one is, the bigger the payoff. They are incredibly easy to extend and maintain once the initial ring is set into place though since they are in orbit so as long as you match its own orbital plane, you can operate on it just fine.
You will have a big superstructure magnetically suspended around the moving ring rotating in the opposite direction to the inner ring at the speed of the earth's own rotation so it stays stationary relative to the ground, and which is both half the reason why we build these things but also makes it significantly difficult to penetrate that inner ring.
That superstructure is going to be much heavier than the inner ring by necessity since that inner ring is moving faster than orbital speeds to counteract the momentum generated by the superstructure. So you might as well use that mass for useful things.
We should also not think of active support structures as somehow less sturdy than passive ones. In fact they are far more sturdy since they can be used to create arbitrarily high levels of compressive strength - whatever level of juice you are willing to expend - and this is where those fusion reactors would indeed come in handy. You would also in reality use multiple inner rings instead of just one though one would be fine too for an initial construction.
Keep in mind though that even considering conventional power sources and no superconductors, these things can regenerate a decent fraction of that expended energy back by using the moving ferromagnetic matter inside to generate electricity through the induction generated by either orbiting along the earth or in the case of the atlas piller, falling all the way down from the mesosphere or even further if you decide that it's worth your investment to extend one all the way to geostationary ala the classic space elevator.
Might be a bit overkill though since the orbital ring itself can easily launch you at decent speeds for cislunar and even interplanetary travel.
You also probably have a shit tonne of solar panels on the superstructure itself and would probably want to add a fission or fusion reactor too for added redundancy since you always want multiple power sources for very large structures.
Either that or we continue to rely on rockets which cannot be scaled up to the point where off world travel is as common as air travel without bringing ecological ruin and gargantuan amounts of noise pollution. It's just about the only real curse of being on a planet that has both a thick atmosphere relative to most rocky planets (in our solar system) and also being the massive of the rocky planets.
>Using these resources to improve chemical flamethrowers is sub-optimal. A dead end.
Earth launch future is large rail gun (somewhere like Bolivia) as a first stage booster. Requires a bit of political will, international cooperation and a few billions. Unfortunately the 1st and 2nd aren't coming soon, so the "chemical flamethrowers" for now.