Third, developing fusion energy will lead to countless spinoff innovations in robotics, supercomputing, and superconducting materials.

FORBES: A Challenge to America: Develop Fusion Power Within a Decade

The idea of using a magnetic field as a solar sail was first suggested a few years ago, but it soon became apparent that creating a field strong enough to be useful would require exotic superconducting materials that, unfortunately, do not exist.

ECONOMIST: Rockets are not the only way to travel through outer space

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's biggest particle accelerator, uses a staggering 1, 200 tonnes of superconducting wire, similar to the sort used in MRI, in order to speed protons up to within a whisker of the speed of light and to collide them inside vast detectors, themselves stuffed with several hundred tonnes of superconducting materials.

ECONOMIST: Inside story