Which is a BIG assumption. Don't get me wrong- Bussard is one of my heroes, but he is a futurist with a istory of being a 'believer' in causes. I don't have the skills to evaluate his claims in physics... But lets assume he is correct.

Firstly- the 'Its just down to the engineering problems' is the same thing that could be said for Inertal Confinement Fusion ala the Tokamak- Beta-1 conditions ( believe, though may be wrong) have been demonstrated in Tokamaks for at least brief periods of times and contingent on what you menn by Beta-1. Personally, I dont see how D+T or D+D fusion in a tokamak, or any Fusion reaction where most of the energy goes to a Fast neutron will ever work economically in a tokamak. In all of those conditions, even if you can harvest the energy from the Neutron with Molten Lithium/steam transfer, you have lots of radioactive waste and you have a faily rapid degradation of all the extreemely delicate and expensive machinery of the Tokamak itself from heat and the fast neutron reaction itself! These are just 'engineering problems', but they are HUGE engineering problems.

I don't know and I can't judge if the 'engineering problems' that Bussard claims as the only remaining obstacle are as profound as what the Tokamak faces. My brother is a pretty frikin' darn good physicist, but most of the projects he has been involved in have been of the character where the truly tough problems- problems that challenge the very usefullness and viability of the technology- have been engineering problems. So he sort of snorted at that claim from Bussard. 'Just Engineering problems' is a HUGE rug under which to sweep many potentially intractable problems.

So I would say that its quite probable that even if Bussard is right, that we may be looking at a 10-15 year develoment curve to shake-out the technology and make it viable for economic power consuption: all depending on money of course. So I don't think that we'll be flying to Pluto on Bussard Wiffle Ball thrust anytime soon, nor plugging in our cars to A Bussard powered grid nex year.

However- I am cautiously optimistic. And given that Bussard is not an idiot, nor never was an idiot, I am inclined to at least take him on reputation when he claims that there is really something important and viable going on here. Given what I know of Government funding- I certainly understand that if members of the review committe view your project as an ideological threat, or if they lack the expertise to see the merit in your claim then you can and will be shot down and cut out of funding very quickly. Believe me- I have witnessed many very good grant proposals die quiet deaths just for these reasons.

Unlike Bussard, I would not cast this as a big conspiracy, but more about how the culture of Big Science and governmental funding works. Given what I know of the NSF procedure, I can see that the DOD or DOE might very well be subject to the same flaws and political failings, and I find it at least plausible that Bussards lamentations on this might be correct.

However- If he has fallen in love with this project, or has converted from Scientist to True Believer, then he could and may well be entirely wrong- not just about the Scalability/'engineering problems', but about the very results themselves. He is not exactly young, and very few physicists stay at the top of their game so late into life.

Yet still, from where I sit, as a Layman in the physical sciences, as a tech R&D professional, and as someone well schooled in the evaluation of claims and their merits: I simply can not dismiss Bussard or his claims.

Therefore, I can only conclude that Bussard really should get the following:

• Media attention! (JimO, you listening? Your our best hope here) with the goal of encouraging the following, namely-
• Impartial peer review from people qualified in the areas of Physics most relevant to those in which Bussards results are situated in
• Attention from the High-Energy Engineering community, with an eye towards establishing the economic tractability and scalability of his device

Until such is carried out and until such evaluations return in the negative, I am at least willing to suspend Skepticism and give Bussard the benefit of the doubt. Unscientifically put: the stakes are simply too high. We're talking about a technology as transformative for society as Electricity, Flight, Packet Switching or even possibly the wheel or the transistor.