by KaiserJeep » Sun 22 Jan 2017, 22:57:00
The last moon program paid it's R&D back in spades. We got silicon chips, solar panels, composite materials, CNC machine tools, microprocessors (first calculators, then PCs), the Internet, vacuum food dehydration, zero gee manufacturing techniques, and much more. That's the nature of R&D, you never quite know in advance what you will discover, or what the practical applications of that discovery are.
R&D advances in two ways. The first one is in a 100% war such as WW2. The second is a Cold War, such as we had with the USSR and are now trying to have with China. We still have a head start in space, particularly anything above Low Earth Orbit. We should extend that lead, and cash in on all the resulting new technology.
Has it occurred to anyone that managing an artificial ecology in a space colony or on someplace like Mars would teach us things about better managing Planet Earth?
KaiserJeep 2.0, Neural Subnode 0010 0000 0001 0110 - 1001 0011 0011, Tertiary Adjunct to Unimatrix 0000 0000 0001
Resistance is Futile, YOU will be Assimilated.
Warning: Messages timestamped before April 1, 2016, 06:00 PST were posted by the unmodified human KaiserJeep 1.0