Quote:
Originally posted by Undertoad
The rub, then, is that since it's public money, you're not allowed to use NASA-type money on anything that doesn't really strike the public's imagination.
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Like planes with morphing wings - another promising advancement in aircraft development. Or a new wing that reduced the sonic boom (and reduces fuel consumption) by 40%. Of the many spectacular planetary missions that even provides incite into how our weather works.
NASA's best work is done on almost no budget - virutally all of the productive stuff in less than 1%. Big budgets are where romantics promote nonsense such as a manned space station that sitll has no purpose. But then we graduate less technically trained people every year. How can the nation apprieciate what is really breakthrough science. No wonder so few see the critical importance of quantum physics to this nation's next technology wave. Too many only believed in bigger battleships (instead of aircraft carriers) because battleships were the big hype 20 years previous. Myopics would never appreciate a breakthrough technology until it was no longer revolutionary.
Much of the technologies in today's computers were based in that government research. Anyone doing advanced particle or plasma research once came to America where the big research tools were built (ie Stanford Linear Accelerator). Next year, there will be a mass migration to Cern. America now believes in investing in presidents, keeping human bodies doing plant maintenance in space, and in liberating countries that don't want to be liberated.