In this talk, we will discuss the progress towards ignition on the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in Northern California. We will cover the some of the setbacks encountered during the progress of the research at NIF, but also cover the great advances that have been made including the achievements of greater than unity fusion ‘fuel gain’ and alpha-heating dominated fusion plasmas. The research strategy for the future will also be discussed.