New Mars Forums

That "fact check" contains fictional terminology that carries no legal meaning with it:

In response to the Democrats' rejected (by Republicans) proposed change to the ACA law to allow illegal aliens to purchase US citizen subsidized health care via the ACA, Democrats refused to fund the US federal government by refusing to sign the appropriations bill authorizing spending.

"Undocumented immigrants" is leftist word salad nonsense for "illegal aliens".  Anyone who is a legal immigrant / alien is also a "documented immigrant / alien".  The legal distinction that actually matters is permission from our government to legally reside in the US.  Anyone who has permission to reside in America also has documentation of that legal decision.

US citizenship documentation for immigrants is obtained by attending an immigration status hearing before an immigration court of law.  The legal decisions made by our immigration courts of law is what determines legality.  The documentation received by a new citizen is evidence that a legal determination was made by those who have the legal authority to do so.  Receiving documentation means an immigrant's request for US citizenship was evaluated by a sitting US judge presiding over an immigration court of law, and determined to be of sufficient legal merit to grant citizenship.

The attempt to use suggestive language to conflate legality with documentation, in the minds of people who likely don't care enough to know anything about US immigration law to begin with, is yet another attempt by Democrats to usurp the rule of law.  There's nothing wrong with having a personal opinion about a law, but presenting an ideologically-held opinion as "fact" is a bridge too far.  Whenever a "fact check" contains ideological language mixed with legal terminology (such as "Affordable Care Act"), it's misleading at best, manipulative and fraudulent at worst.  It's crystal clear that Democrats don't respect our laws, except perhaps when the law can be wielded as a cudgel for political advantage.  When that fails, they resort to violence, which they support and encourage.

tahanson43206,

If I understand the request correctly, I'm going to install / publish the phpBB3 web app on our NewMars web server.

What about database requirements?

Do I need to install and configure a database schema on our MySQL Server as well?

Is this a "standard" phpBB3 setup, or have you customized the phpBB3 web app or the database schema in any way?

I'm talking about editing the php files or database schema tables and objects, not any photos you've added.

Edit:
This web app is purely for local storage of user-generated media files, such as the rocketry-related PowerPoint presentations / photos / videos created by GW Johnson, correct?

SpaceNut,

The overwhelming majority of energy consumption in all western homes, US or otherwise, is for direct heating and cooling applications.  Thermal energy accounts for almost 75% of all the energy consumed in the average home, possibly more now that large TVs / desktop computers / incandescent bulbs have largely been replaced by laptops or cell phones and LED bulbs.  That means a home's HVAC system is responsible for most of that 1.2-1.25kW figure.  Home solar systems that fit on the roof of the home cannot provide that energy directly, because they're insufficiently powerful.

We had 67 photovoltaic panels on the roof and 2 Tesla Power Walls next to the breakers of the last home we owned.  At no point in time did those devices directly provide the input electrical energy for our home's HVAC system, because they weren't capable of doing so.  I asked the licensed electrical engineer who sold us our home solar system, what would be required to directly power the 3 AC units associated with our HVAC system, and he told me that most of our property's back yard would also need photovoltaic panels covering it.  He said somewhere between double and triple the number of panels we actually had installed would be required to directly power our home's HVAC system, as well as another 2 to 4 Tesla Power Walls, in addition to the 2 Tesla Power Walls that were installed, to store more electrical power for use at night.  Such a large photovoltaic / battery bank system would also be 50% to 60% of our home's purchase price.  Texas does not allow ground-mount photovoltaic panels to be installed on residential property.

Our photovoltaics were, IIRC, 26.5% efficient, at BOL.  Converting photonic / thermal power to electrical power is not terribly efficient, but using rooftop and ground hot / cold sinks to power HVAC systems is more practical because so much power from the Sun is NOT lost up-front by using photovoltaics to convert the incoming photonic energy into electrical energy.  Until radically more efficient and less costly photovoltaics become available, the total quantity of thermalized photonic energy available from the Sun, per unit of collector surface area, is at least 3X greater, using less costly equipment.  In simpler terms, our home's rooftop provided sufficient surface area to host thermal power collection equipment capable of generating high temperatures for the "hot side" of the thermal power transfer loop.

90% (visible spectrum photons to thermal spectrum photons) vs 26.5% (photons to electron movement) is a much greater total percentage of input power to work with, per unit of collector surface area, especially since the energy consumption system it's primarily being fed into is a thermal power transfer system (an over-glorified refrigerant loop- a device that works on the principle of a hot and cold sink).  An HVAC system, a refrigerator, and cooking appliances all produce thermal output.

If most homes in America had 75% of their energy consumption provided by an onsite system that doesn't need to be connected to any grid, doesn't require a large amount of space in the yard, and doesn't require anything more complex and costly than some additional indoor plumbing to transfer thermal power from "rooftop water heat tech", that single change would deliver a major reduction in emissions at a cost that most people could actually afford to roll into their home's purchase price.  Although there certainly are more exotic materials and refrigerants such a system could use, we're mostly talking about steel and water.

Does anyone remember this wild-looking thing NASA created?:

quasar777,

Perhaps you're thinking of the "Deus Ex Machina" concept created by Loniak Design for Yamaha Racing:
New Atlas - The Deus Ex Machina Wheeled Exoskeleton - new horizons in personal mobility - June 13th, 2008

Edit (a pic of the device without its rider / wearer):

This was the "techno-futurism" gadgetry that was supposed to power the above device:
Nano-phosphate batteries / ultra-capacitors for 15 minute recharge times (still a highly experimental tech)
Top Speed: 75mph; 0-60mph: 3 seconds (should be good for killing yourself quickly on the moon)
36 pneumatic "muscles" (presumably for steering of this "wearable vehicle")
2 linear actuators (presumably for adjusting ride height / angle)
Artificial "spine" with 7 "vertebrae" (presumably for weight shifting)

There's enough cool-sounding buzz-words strung together to satisfy the most discriminating keyboard motorcyclist.  All of the above listed techno gadgets are technically real, at least as lab-ready concepts, and some do work to one degree or another, but not as part of a singular integrated vehicle design with exhaustive testing behind it, which would be a hard requirement for this "wearable" off-road ATV-like device to be used on the lunar surface for personal off-road transport.

Do I think it could work?

It probably could, but why not just design a proper dirt bike or ATV and call it a day?  What significant benefits does this over-sophisticated device provide to its wearer, apart from a "flying / gliding sensation"?  Is there any mass / volume benefit?  I think the origami folding feature might save some space.  However, looking cool and functioning reliably are two very different things.  It's undeniably cool, but what would razor-sharp grains of lunar regolith do to all of its flexible parts?  We should probably test that here on Earth, first.

A key technology for solar power satellites, only now in its infancy, is room temperature masers- coherent microwave power transmission devices.  Synthetic diamond wafers are capable of transmitting RF power without significant loss of beam coherency over great distances.  Imperial College London and Northumbria University have done quite a bit of the civil work on such devices, all of it within the past 15 years or so.  We can think of this tech as the microwave frequency equivalent of a laser, but without the significant efficiency losses that still plague solid state lasers.  The insistence on using solid state electronic devices is why high power military lasers remain relatively impractical.  Lasers with exceptional power outputs measured in megawatts have been available for many decades, but require complex chemical processes that need to be managed by qualified engineers to prevent the devices from exploding in operation.  For obvious reasons, the military didn't want to contend with that kind of complexity, in much the same way that virtually all military missiles use solid rocket motors vs liquids.

Traditional masers were experimented with from the 1950s to 1970s for military applications related to sensing, targeting, and communications, but unfortunately required deeply cryogenic temperatures, and were mostly scientific curiosities due to their special operating requirements, despite repeated attempts to further develop the tech for military purposes.  I watched a couple of TED Talks and tech presentations on this new class of devices on YouTube a few months back.  Prior to that, I never knew room temperature maser devices existed.

I think one of our first Mars probes was able to transmit pictures from Mars to Earth because a maser-based deep space receiver on Earth was so selective that the paltry RF power output from the probe's radio could be tuned-into well enough to capture the data it sent back.  However, that device had to be operated near absolute zero using LH2 or LHe, IIRC.

In the near-future, I think these devices will see use as low-cost / low-power microwave band radar systems for space probes / light aircraft / missiles / drones.  Longer-term, their application to solar power satellites is compelling.  A maser's ability to significantly reduce the size of ground-based rectennas means individual vehicles could be effectively powered from orbit.  Room temperature maser tech has the potential to dispense with some of the heavy batteries and solar arrays in favor of beaming power.

One particularly interesting presentation from Northumbria related to using a LED for the input power driving a room temperature maser device.  If we can almost directly create coherent microwave radiation using photonic input power that would be a real game changer for orbital power stations.

Anyway...

As power requirements scale up, there's quite a difference in terms of overall design, total system complexity, and materials energy input between square kilometers of semiconductors vs mirrors or fiber optics.  Mirrors can be scaled-up in a more or less linear in nature, especially when the photonic power is being thermalized into a central receiver tube.  For a mirror with 200m^2 vs 20m^2 of surface area, the components used in the plant design don't change substantially.  The cost differential is mostly a function of the mass of materials produced and transported.  In terms of total plant cost per Watt, there's an economy of scale to be had by using thermal power systems.

This is not the case for purely electronic power systems where every component in the system is some type of electronic device.  The differences in voltages and amperages dictate the use of entirely different electrical and electronic components to efficiently transmit and condition the power from the periphery of an array, back to a centralized collection / distribution station.  The semiconductor wafers used to generate the power don't change, but transmitting 10X to 100X more electrical power back to a centralized point, presumably for microwave power transmission to a ground-based rectenna, involves changing everything else.  The wiring gauges must change, insulation requirements increase to prevent arcing since a significant voltage increase is the primary means to reduce resistance losses during power transmission while minimize wiring mass, step-up / step-down transformers must also change, and the array control system changes to account for many more array elements and system components.  A control system appropriate for a 100kWe to 1MWe array is inappropriate for a 1,000MWe array.

For a high temperature thermal system with a centralized receiver tower and Supercritical CO2 gas turbine turning an electric generator, concentrating 10MWth vs 1,000MWth requires a direct scale-up of the same basic plant components.  The count and/or surface area of the mirrors changes substantially, but a thermal power plant doesn't involve a multitude of wiring runs with different gauges, power inverters, step-up transformers, electronic control and monitoring systems, etc.

If a photonic-to-maser power system ever becomes practical, then we can dispense with thermal-to-electrical conversion as well, using only fiber optics to collect power from the Sun, special solar-pumped diodes which directly convert (~35% efficient) the photonic power to feed the maser, and then transmit it as RF power to ground-based power terminals, for conversion to electrical power by the powered device.  Photovoltaic-to-LED-diode is far less efficient, typically below 10%.  Masers can be around 35% efficient over millimeter wavelengths useful for power transmission through atmospheric water vapor.  Here on Earth, we might use such tech to power ships at sea.  Some people will fixate on the apparent lack of efficiency, but the figure that matters is the ability to continuously remotely power an enormous machine, such as an ocean-going cargo ship, or perhaps a train on Mars, without enormous quantities of onboard energy storage, ground-based power generation and distribution infrastructure, or operational problems arising from intermittent power availability.

The most obvious first use case for a multi-gigawatt maser-based power satellite is thermal power transfer to boost the orbits of satellites and spacecraft in lower orbits.  A power sat would save the most money by powering vehicles from the launch pad using simplistic Hydrogen-based heat engines, ones requiring no oxidizer mass, then to propel heavy payloads to higher orbits, and ultimately to achieve escape velocity for interplanetary transfers.  Decoupling the energy supply from the powered vehicle means very heavy payloads can be moved using only modest amounts of propellant.

One question I have, though, is if we can generate gigawatts of power in orbit, then why not consume it there for manufacturing purposes?

As we transition to optical computing devices that are anywhere between 1M and 10M times more efficient per compute operation, why not put those new AI data centers in orbit where they're co-located with a power source capable of delivering a near-direct power source for their consumption?

The Earth observation and military satellites are already doing a lot of onboard imagery processing prior to sending the data back to Earth, so drastically increasing their compute power using optical chips consuming direct / near-direct optical power from the Sun is the next logical step in their evolution.  Maser-based synthetic aperture radar could provide HD video-like image resolution in almost any weather conditions.  The X-band radars they already use are capable of centimeter resolution and easily pick up supposedly "stealthy" ships and aircraft, which are specifically supposed to reduce observability against X-band radar.  The images are a little more "blurry" when compared to non-stealthy objects, yet clearly identifiable as to exactly what they are.  These things won't be able to read the paper you have in your hand, but they will be able to discriminate between civil and military ships / aircraft / vehicles, discard non-essential information, clean up the images, and only return near-finished intelligence products for human assessment.

Since the military is already paying for a lot of this development, and the civil applications also benefit at the same time, why not ask Daddy Warbucks to help finance the power transmission and sensing tech we'll inevitably need when we settle Mars?

Those recon satellites are already dual-use, meaning an "ordinary" (but wealthy) civilian can pay for and request their imagery.  The government paid to put them up there and pays to have priority on tasking, but apart from that almost anyone with money (provided they're not an enemy of the state) gets to benefit from them.  All we'd be doing is giving them a gentle nudge in the direction they already want to go.

On that note, what about using power satellites in higher orbits to power observation satellites in lower orbits, and power relays transferring power from GEO to LEO or GEO to LEO to surface?

We could also use GEO power sats to "clean up" the lower orbits by delivering optical or maser power to de-orbit the junk using ablation, or perhaps even collect it for recycling since we already expended energy to put it up there in the first place.

tahanson43206,

We're in the process of moving between houses.  The new house is only a block or so from the old house, but downsizing has had it's challenges.  In the new house, the seller's movers removed the existing stacked washer and dryer they initially claimed was going to stay in the house, and then left the water spigots for the washer turned on, with the end result that the first floor was flooded out in our new home after the utilities turned our water back on.  Most of the first floor is tile and I caught it within about an hour, but the bedrooms are carpeted, which created a huge mess.  Water and carpets don't mix.  There were other plumbing issues as well, which I'm slowly resolving.  Long story short, that mess delayed our move.  Fun times, as always.

Our leftist Democrats are now warning us about the fact that they're behaving as real communists / fascists / what's the difference typically behave, because they're tired of waiting to establish a proper dictatorship here in America.  Whatever accusations Democrats are making, you can be sure that's what they're actually doing.  Thanks for the warning, though.  My fellow Republicans have told them, repeatedly, that their dystopian dictatorship fantasy is never going to happen.  I've not seen Democrats this agitated since we took their slaves away from them.

Separation of powers is an ongoing issue, one which will never be fully resolved, especially since Congress continuously delegates authority to the President.  Whether it was wise for Congress to delegate their authority is another matter entirely.

One American President you disagree with was elected for four years, so there will be no more elections in America after he's gone?  Good to know.  I'll file that one away for the next election in 2028.  I'm aware of the fact that Democrats want to remove the ability of the electorate to choose who and what to vote for, but President Trump's second election was a giant middle finger to that idea.

When President Obama deported far more illegals than President Trump has thus far, where was your outrage over the constitutionality of his decision making back then?  Either show some consistency in your condemnation or admit that you're not consistent because you're prejudiced against President Trump because he's making decisions that show deference to the American people, its own citizens, rather than people from everywhere else.

All law enforcement requires interpretation of the law.  If a person who is not a lawyer or judge isn't allowed to interpret what a law means, then there's no such thing as law enforcement.  Lawyers and judges aren't rolling around in squad cars, arresting murderers, thieves, and rapists.  The person enforcing the law is effectively "deciding" if/when/how a law has been broken... which sounds an awful lot like they had to make an interpretation of what the law is and how to enforce it.

The United States Congress has delegated their authority to make / adjust tariffs, to the President of the United States, pursuant to codified law, which Congress has passed and previous Presidents have duly signed into law.  More specifically, a Democrat President named John F. Kennedy signed much of the basis for the President Trump's congressionally-delegated power to levy and/or increase tariffs, into codified enforceable law.  Democrat President Jimmy Carter used this law in 1979.  Republican President Reagan used the law in 1982.  President Trump is now using that very same law in 2025.

The US Constitution is the litmus test for all laws.  It is not now and never has been the law itself.  The only thing that's meaningfully changed in 2024 is that President Trump has recognized that the US cannot run a trillion dollar trade deficit indefinitely without affecting the quality of life for the lower and middle classes here in America, so he's using the powers delegated to him, by Congress, to attempt to improve their lives through greater domestic production of all goods and services, which they can capitalize on by supplying their own labor in deference to their own countrymen.  If the United States Congress doesn't like President Trump's delegated powers to make or change tariffs, then a 2/3rds majority vote to modify or entirely rescind the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 would remove all previously delegated Executive Branch power to make and adjust tariffs, irrespective of what President Trump thinks about it, which Congress has thus far refused to do.

Until the Supreme Court either reinterprets the President's delegated powers to make or change tariffs, or the United States Congress acts to modify or rescind those powers, President Trump's ability to exercise those delegated powers carries the force of law with it.  I do so wish people lecturing Americans about our own laws would inconvenience themselves by actually learning something about the law and how it works, beyond their personal beliefs / desires about it.

About a decade ago, the mainstream left in America ran out of plausible arguments to explain away their increasingly anti-social behavior, which was a manifestation of their radicalization.  From the time of President Obama onward, the Democrat Party was hijacked by radicals, people who became the "next-wave" socialists and communists, the ones who were responsible for the majority of the political violence in America between the 1960s and 1970s.  Senator Joe McCarthy wasn't wrong about the threat these people represented, but American society was too earnest and polite to deal with them as the clear and present danger to human civilization that they've always been.  After more than a century, there hasn't been a single successful implementation of their utopian socialist / communist society, yet they persist in their dogmatic religious beliefs about the proper role of government in society.  They've always brought misery and mass death to people dumb enough to fall for their tricks.  Those same radicals, who are now of age to hold positions of significant political power, don't even pretend that they want to be Americans anymore.

The rest of us have been forced to suffer through the radical left's endless stream of fake manufactured identity crises and general depravity.  The left's indoctrination-from-birth radicalizes their cry-bullies and general purpose street thugs via the educational system, and then leads them around by the nose, from made-up problem to made-up problem.  The sky is always falling in their world.  That's the only way to unite the left's myriad of fractious opposing-interest factions, who otherwise have little to no common cause to vote for the same people.  The near-nonexistent attention span of their rank-and-file membership is all our radical left has left to work with.  Any honest classical liberal has already left the Democrat Party, the party of death and destruction, finally realizing to their horror that they don't remotely believe the same things the people around them do.  It's an endless attempt to avert attention away from how wicked they've become in their lust for power.  The left's now self-evident issue connecting with ordinary Americans is that normal people who have classical liberal tendencies don't want to live in a society based upon wickedness, intimidation, and violence.  That "control strategy" has not worked well for them, as of late.  More and more people are fed-up with the corrosive nature of the left's policies and their naked communist agenda.

Charlie Kirk was the most recent sacrifice to the violence which is both supported and imposed by the radical left.  He dared to voice his opinions in public, one which merely illustrated the results of the radical left's horror show of public policy making and culture, which makes a mockery of the ideals of democracy, so one of them murdered the man who was famous for going to college campuses around the country and debating beliefs and policies with leftists.  He exchanged words with people he disagreed with, rather than arrows.  Our leftist media and their brainwashed drones immediately posted videos gleefully celebrating his murder.  Their total lack of self-awareness is mind-numbing but predictable.  They represent the latest incarnation of a failed ideology, one devoid introspection or love or forgiveness.

Any person or political party who publicly advocates for your murder and financial destruction, or attempts to silence you until they can murder you, is not one which you can peacefully coexist with, because they won't allow it.  I'm done pretending that these people are anything but brainwashed to the point of absurdity and violence.  They no longer attempt civil discourse, because they're incapable of it.  Every action and utterance of theirs only further reinforces that point.

The "missing context" of my prior post, since only GW and tahanson43206 were present for our Sunday meeting, is for use as the material of choice for the booster stage's propellant tanks, which only see a peak velocity of about Mach 5 and peak heating of about 1,000F as the booster falls back through the atmosphere and lands the way the Starship booster lands.

CFRP is far stronger and lighter than any kind of metal alloy, even with temperature transients of up to 1,000F.  CFRP fabricated using special resins, such as Polybenzimidazole (PBI), used in conjunction with externally applied thermal barrier coatings, can survive the peak heating transient associated with the booster's burnout velocity, without the use of heavier and more delicate heat shielding tiles.  The combination of 800F capable PBI (without degradation or softening) and a thin (1.4mm thickness) thermal barrier coating such as Aluminum-Oxide (Al2O3), will allow a booster stage's propellant tanks to be fabricated from IM7 fiber, at perhaps 1/4 the mass of 304L stainless steel, presuming that the bulk structure is 4mm thick (the propellant tank wall thickness of the actual Starship Super Heavy Booster).  Said composite would still be drastically stronger than 304L over the entire temperature range that the booster experiences.  Said materials have already been tested by NASA, for use in the Space Shuttle Program, all the way back in 1969, which is when testing of those materials began.

PBI is expensive and hard to process because it requires greatly elevated temperatures during the molding process, relative to all other thermoplastics.  The base material itself is not egregiously expensive to purchase in bulk quantity, but on a per-mass basis, plastic parts made from or with PBI are much more expensive to use than resins which can be molded at much lower temperatures.  I think it qualifies as a "Gucci" material in that regard, but only because resin molding at elevated temperatures is relatively uncommon.  All that is to say that the molding equipment required to fabricate gigantic PBI-infused CFRP parts, such as propellant tanks, will cost a pretty penny (tens to low hundreds of millions), but buying the PBI plastic resin material itself from Celanese / "PBI Performance Products, Inc." will not be outlandishly costly.  If a corporation or Uncle Sam owns the high temperature mold and robotic tape winding equipment, that's one-time cost to them, and then very light yet highly temperature resistant CFRP parts can be robotically tape-wound / compression molded / fully cured in a matter of days, with far less touch-labor on the part itself.  A small team of semi-skilled materials handlers will be required.  Touch labor will mostly be limited to removal of mold flashing.  Application of the thermal barrier coating would be done using a robot to ensure highly uniform thickness, as is already common for ceramic coated pipeline components used in the oil and gas industry.

Hypersonic Materials and Structures

All those new materials and fabrication methods under T&E 10 years ago are now fairly standard for reentry TPS.  Starship could be using any of those new TPS materials, most likely some combination of them.

I think pure greenfield science is a worthy goal unto itself.  I agree with the notion that pursuit of knowledge, for its own sake, is a worthy and laudable goal.  However, when our stated exploration goals require better / cheaper / faster propulsion systems, and we have what's required on-offer from a competent corporation that can deliver the goods, I think that is where science must be goal-oriented.  A number of corporations have offered improved engines over many decades now.  Apart from SpaceX and Blue Origin, NASA is still using engines that were the product of 1970s development efforts.  NASA and DoD spent billions upon billions of dollars on new engine designs, but none of them ever replaced what they've either been developing or actively using over 50+ years.  That's the extent of what we have to show for all the efforts made by our various aerospace primes.  There's no world where that makes rational sense, except in a carefully constructed one that's long since been strangled by bureaucracy.  The RS-25 could've been evolved into something 3D-printed components, uncooled RCC nozzles, improved turbopump designs and materials, etc.  We spent good money and decades of development work on all of that, yet it's nowhere to be found in the engines NASA is using to send people back to the moon.  It's little wonder that their rockets cost so much and have flown so infrequently, relative to what was promised.  We can't keep running the same program while expecting different results.

There's a reasonably logical progression to in-space propulsion technology, the one mission critical technology where all of humanity is weakest.  We began with solid rockets which were more suitable for weapons than space launch vehicles.  We swiftly moved on to liquid fueled engines.  We developed ion engines around the same time the Apollo Program was in full-swing.  Around the same time development of ion engines began in earnest, we also developed nuclear thermal rockets using compact / high power density fission reactor cores.  Neither were intended to replace chemical rockets for orbital launch vehicles, but both were necessary in-space propulsion solutions to problems that chemical rockets could not address in a practical way.  Fusion rockets are the next logical progression of in-space propulsion options.  While we work on fusion rockets, we should continue to pursue propellantless "impulse" engines and warp drives.  Although teleportation and various other Star Trek level technologies will likely require another century or more of development work, if we put forth the effort now, when it matters most to near-term colonization efforts, then we'll have "real starships" by the time we work out the details of the more advanced bits of Star Trek tech.  What we cannot do, presuming the goal is real exploration and colonization, is to continue to aimlessly throw money at every potentially interesting new propulsion technology without maturing "within reach" technologies to relentlessly advance our propulsion systems.  Pulsed fusion using supersonic implosion of light alloy foils to generate thrust is well within reach.  Continuous fusion using gases would be better still, but we're probably at least a couple of decades away from that being achievable.

Why wait another several decades for "better fusion rockets", when a fully functional pulsed fusion rocket would mean on-demand access (no waiting for orbits to align) to the solar system within the next decade?  All the individual pieces work.  We need to put them together into a fully functional high-thrust / 5,000s+ Isp in-space propulsion system.  This is an engineering task, rather than a greenfield tech development task.  NASA balked at spending more money on completing development of a pulsed fusion rocket engine the moment a continuous fusion rocket looked as though it was a possibility.  It's as if they cannot maintain focus long enough to produce a fully functional product usable for their own purposes.  In their own words, they did that "because a continuous fusion rocket engine could be even better".  That sounds great, but nobody has created a fully functional stationary continuous fusion reactor, so creating a flight weight continuous fusion rocket engine seems more than a little premature, even though there are companies actively pursuing this.  We have to start somewhere, so clearing the lowest set of technological hurdles to an operational fusion rocket engine seems like the best place for NASA and JPL to start.  Argue over how the rocket could be made "even better" after you have a TRL9 pulsed fusion rocket engine.  Improving the TRL of a continuous fusion rocket engine ought to be that much easier when you already have an in-service pulsed fusion engine.

We need people and corporations to expand the edges of the performance envelope with the express purpose of using the fruits of their labor as a goal-oriented enabler for our stated exploration and colonization objectives.  NASA, the agency, stated quite clearly that human exploration of Mars was the prize, even as it continued to pursue a plethora of pure science projects.  While useful in their own right, the "result" which emerged over the course of many decades was an unfocused and unimaginative collection of distantly related science projects with no clear tieback to stated exploration objectives.  The problem, at least as I see it, is the lack of measurable progress towards the agency's stated human exploration objective.  Nobody who is in charge seems the least bit interested in true exploration, likely because it's dangerous, unpredictable, expensive, and requires unwavering determination to succeed.  We clearly had that during the Apollo Program, but lost it somehow because we changed technologies.  We looked for reasons why we couldn't succeed, rather than accepting and using what was on offer.  For example, Shuttle-C should've been pursued during the Space Shuttle era to maintain the capability to conduct exploration missions.  SLS is about 30 years late.  ISS should've been used as a prototype Interplanetary Transport Vehicle.  The means has always been there, but the will has not.

It would be fair to say that private corporations are now driving technological development aimed at specific exploration and colonization objectives, because various billionaires see space exploration and colonization as one of the few remaining, truly worthwhile, "next steps" in human development.  After you acquire tens of billions of dollars, space exploration and colonization is the only worthwhile investment commensurate with the level of investment involved.  You can build more factories to turn out new tech trinkets, gold-plate your toilets, or build an enormous yacht that might get used once per year, but eventually all of those "status symbols" will be viewed as empty idle pursuits by someone who is driven to build an empire.  Elon Musk famously lives in a studio apartment, drives an unremarkable "standard" Tesla his company built, and owns a handful of clothes, because there's no point to accumulating more "stuff" that he'll never see or use.  This is a very peculiar state of affairs, because traditionally governments have been the driving force behind exploration efforts.

The men and women who are now leading these efforts have looked upon what their governments are doing and said to themselves, "You're no longer completing the job that the people you represent expect to be done, after you sold them on the idea and spent obscene amounts of money.  We don't have many milestones we can point to whereby progress can be shown to the general public.  We're taking over where you've failed us."  That's the quiet part, not typically said out-loud, but it's present in the minds of people looking at what NASA is doing and asking pointed questions about the apparent lack of progress.  Do or do not.  There is no "try".

tahanson43206,

Here's a link that shows the "belly-to-belly" MUSTARD spaceplane concept that uses 3 roughly identical spacecraft, 1 of which would ascend all the way to orbit:

MUSTARD Launch Configuration Images