There's a mythical man month issue in that even with unlimited budget and resources progress can only proceed so fast, even with the best people to learn from t

There's a mythical man month issue in that even with unlimited budget and resources progress can only proceed so fast, even with the best people to learn from the experiments. However there's also just the actual literal cost of RnD. There's no hard cost in budget either. It's more like an apples to oranges comparison, but look at the progress that SpaceX has made in commercial space flight, and that's AFTER we've established that it's possible with all of the path-finding missions in the half century prior. Fundamental research is an investment in the future. Aside from ensuring that the basic levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (1) are met, funding research that expands the public infrastructure and public domain of knowledge of how the world works, and third designs for common industrial infrastructure, such as power generation. Commercial fusion would be either much closer to reality or known to be infeasible with current technology if research were funded both adequately and predictably (so people could make careers and lives in that). (1): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs