Reply To: Space Flight

[dennisp]

Sure, if another power source arrives which is non-polluting, non-radioactive, works at small scales, doesn’t require a steady input of large amounts of fuel from external sources, and is one or two orders of magnitude cheaper than anything we’ve got now, then that would work equally well. You could say the same thing about half the discussions in these forums.

I’m not aware of anything like that in development, so I think my question is fairly well focused on FF. (Cold fusion might qualify but seems less likely to work, and polywell works best at large scale. Fission is much more expensive than FF, and is mostly large-scale. The Hyperion reactors are small but you have to go buy a new one every ten years or so. Pretty much everything is more expensive than coal.)