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Interesting. I wonder if we could somehow return to that clip of progress in science and technology. If we did so, who knows where the US might have been now, i

• pjc50 8y ago
  Arguably the whole Moore's Law era proceeded at that clip, and it's given us the iPhone, GPS, various starts at ""AI"", etc. The real problem with returning to the space race was that it was fundamentally a public sector project. People seem to forget that it was the state that put a man on the moon. In 2018 the key question for such projects would be not "how can we benefit humanity" but "who gets to keep the profit"?
  • philipkglass 8y ago
    Or even more fundamentally, "is there any profit for someone to keep?" It's not like the Apollo program was the space equivalent of a state owned rail system -- capable of making money for the first private owner to take it over. It was always "in the red" if you measure such things in business terms. People twist themselves in knots trying (IMO) to assign dubious "spinoff" benefits, with dollar signs attached, to NASA work. Give up on trying to justify all scientific research in the vocabulary of business, I say. I support public funding for space probes, astronomy, high energy physics, and all sorts of other things that expand the frontiers of human knowledge without being likely to generate new commercial products or profits.