It may be another ISS boondoggle, as you say, but it seems to me that there's a chance for some serious benefit to all mankind in fusion. The "science" of ISS seems to have been pretty well done by Mir and Skylab, and the propaganda value is about zilch. (It seems a little like the Vietnam war, really. No one wants to pull it down, because to do so would be to admit a mistake on the part of their forebears of either and both parties.)

Fusion, on the other hand, would seem to be a phenomenum just waiting for technology and materials science to catch up with it. Better clocks, faster sensors with quicker computers providing timely feedback, better materials rapidly controlling stronger EM fields and I think you may have a viable option for cheap power. And the technology will be there, if history holds. In thirty or so years.

'Thirty years' is safe - by the time thirty years rolls around everyone, except you, has forgotten, and 'they' can take off their glasses, look you straight in the eye, and say that at the way things are going it will be about thirty years. As with the 'end-of-the-worlders', one of 'em will be right.

Now what mankind does with cheap power is another thing. A little frightening, really.

Arf