As a practical response to a growing energy crisis and global climate change, fusion power isn’t exactly ideal. But it does promise a great deal of advances in scientific knowledge, and if the technology develops successfully over time, it’ll probably be very useful in space-borne applications. So, fingers crossed for the first test run of China’s experimental superconducting tokomak reactor, scheduled for mid-August.

That heatwave? It’s not just happening over there in the US, you know, us Brits are baking too (and with our short tempers, believe me – that’s bad news). In fact we’ve seen record breaking temperatures over here, combined with unprecedented levels of atmospheric pollutants. Hockey stick? What hockey stick? It’s just a fluke, right?

Not everybody is happy with NASA’s current gameplan, it appears. The Space frontier Foundation has published a damning paper that accuses the agency of failing to implement the visions of Bush’s ‘Vision for Space Exploration’ in a valid manner, and that they should be pushing the private enterprise angle harder than they are. Whether this is actually the case, or if there’s more politics than meets the eye, remains to be seen.

Regular readers of this site have doubtless noted we’ve been a bit slack in getting our columns going on a regular basis. The reasons for this are many in number, and are mostly connected to the fact that all contributors to Futurismic have other commitments too, usually ones that pay them for their time (we do this just for the love, you know).

However, yours truly is taking the helm of the essays department, and it is my intention to ramp up the frequency of new work appearing in this section – not just from the usual Futurismic faces, but hopefully from some special guests as well. I’ll keep you posted as to further developments.

In the meantime, there’s a new piece from me about to go live. I hope you find it (and subsequent works) interesting and thought-provoking – as always, reader comments are more than welcome, because Futurismic is your site too.

Private space enterprise company Bigelow has achieved an unprecedented success with their prototype inflatable space station this week. Space.com rounds up the bigwigs of the space scene to ask them for their opinions on Bigelow’s big plans.