This excerpt is fascinating: "..Taylor talked ARPA director Charles Herzfeld into allocating a million dollars for R&D into a new network to connect the compute

This excerpt is fascinating: "..Taylor talked ARPA director Charles Herzfeld into allocating a million dollars for R&D into a new network to connect the computers at MIT, UCLA, SRI, and many other sites. Herzfeld got the money by redirecting it from a ballistic missile research program into the ARPA budget. The cost was justified within DoD circles by saying that ARPA was tasked with building a “survivable” network that wouldn’t go down if any specific part was destroyed, perhaps in a nuclear attack." Research funding is important! I think similar arguments can be made to increase funding for NASA projects (perhaps this already happens).