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While you are right that Musk favors engineering/cost improvements on existing ideas. I don't think there's a clear dividing line between science and engineerin

While you are right that Musk favors engineering/cost improvements on existing ideas. I don't think there's a clear dividing line between science and engineering. SpaceX has numberous "firsts", including reusable rockets and some engine designs. So it's not right to say they just do things we've been doing for decades. And on the other end, the physics behind fusion is pretty well understood. The difficulties/expense are in building the thing, and dealing with issues like plasma instability. We call that "science" mostly because it is a state funded project. If a private company were doing the same thing, it would be called R&D.

lambdatronics 6y ago
>We call that "science" mostly because it is a state funded project. Interesting perspective. I agree that arguably most of the difficulties are more in the applied side of things, although calling it engineering might be going too far. The big looming physics uncertainty is crossing the 'burning plasma' threshold, where the plasma becomes dominantly self-heating. There are two aspects to this: (1) will the plasma settle into a nice self-consistent steady state? (2) will the large quantity of fast fusion-born helium nuclei destabilize the plasma in an unexpected way? Theory says it should work, but the proof is in the experiment (which is why SPARC & ITER are being built).