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I was stunned by the extreme underestimation of space-based solar power technology by a science popularizer on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZPrIE5ZMZA
It reminded me closely of ESA's treatment of reusable launchers a decade or so before it was wiped out by SpaceX. That it came from a science popularization channel is depressing.
The serial economics of a solar plant have slipped under the radar: it is very different to build a nuclear plant on site than to connect a series of all identical elements in orbit as it is possible to do.
There is a very significant passage where world governments (Japan, US, EU, Britain, China) are treated like idiots chasing each other while experts tell each other it is not possible. I don't think the reality comes close to what is portrayed in the video and in the comments that treat the whole thing as nonsense.
Another bad argument for an outreach channel is to say: this technology will not work. I take action to discredit it (200k views of the first video at the moment), then come back in 10 years and see if it is successful.
If everyone believes it won't succeed, it won't, because no one will invest and it will be discredited to work in that field. If you side with one side rather than the other you are operating politically so that what you think should happen will happen, self-fulfilling the prophecy.
Not surprisingly, a following video reinforces the previous one, going to celebrate the stop of research by some entities:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyPOPfFvJ8A
It is no coincidence here that the idiot governments mentioned above become sensible when they kill research in that area. Technology is equated with banana peels at the bottom of a barrel that is rather a trash can. Does it follow that researchers who rummage in the trash can are bums? Is ESA going to play the bum?
How this sarcasm-based rhetoric breaks through is beyond me. It is not clever, it is not intriguing it is just destructive.
In the 1990s a prototype reusable launcher was developed by McDonnell Douglas. Project discontinued in 1996 after just $60 million in expenditures:
https://x.com/ToughSf/status/1804122097343697072
The thing the detractors don't understand is that a small expense now can make great strides. What would the world have been like if we had not stopped in 1996 with reusable launchers?
Killing research for a new technology that we cannot accomplish with current tools is really short sighted.
We are talking about suppressing public research in an area of technology where both the cost per kilo is plummeting thanks to reusable launchers, the cost of photovoltaics is falling, and conversion efficiency is increasing.
Is the ultimate goal to be right, to win a dialectical confrontation, to discredit a field of research or to improve electricity production with less polluting systems?
Unfortunately, there is nothing to celebrate.