Ironically, the US government had the opportunity to fund this project when it comes as still entirely contained at MIT. They didn't, and so the fusion people a

Ironically, the US government had the opportunity to fund this project when it comes as still entirely contained at MIT. They didn't, and so the fusion people at MIT spun a startup to be able to receive funding and collaborate with the scientists still at MIT. So the government (1) could have been at the forefront of this project through funding MIT, (2) its tech and results would be entirely public, (3) we may have already had first plasma with sparc by now because the time it took MIT to accept they were no longer going to receive tokamak levels of funding - and then come up with CFS as a solution to get private funding for work within MITs system