The US has announced a “bold decadal vision” to have a fusion pilot plant within a decade, i.e. around 2035. This is ambitious!
Can we point to any precedents to similarly complex projects (e.g. Apollo Project) in history, and infer something about the timeline, funding, and workforce required to get to commercial scale? Is there a checkpoint date at which we can assess whether the decadal vision is likely to happen in time or not? Perhaps. The Manhattan Project cost 150B and employed 400,000 individuals.