And once that happens of course, the door to our space future will really be open - forever. But we can't now predict accurately which is going to be the best investment. Once we can just get started , so some companies are actually earning serious, genuinely commercial money in space, different companies will invest in different projects and fight it out commercially - to the advantage of the customers. And the scale of such business makes all current space activities trivial by comparison. But herein also lies one of the problems for SPS .
Transport is a totally different business from electricity supply.
And electricity companies are not going to go into space transportation. So the launch cost problem has to be cracked by other groups - and then the electricity companies will get interested in SPS . Overall, there is no rational justification for not funding SPS research seriously. Indeed, some electricity companies even think that talk of SPS is crazy - because it's easy to calculate that at today's launch costs it's out of the question.