Re: some here will find this amusing

quoth Guillaume Laurent:

| Do you have specific examples ? As far as I know, neither the
| transistor nor the integrated circuit were consequences of the Apollo
| program.

no, they were not invented in apollo, but their miniaturization, 
reliability, and ease of production were. i just now got a note from a 
fellow whose insulin pump, which has improved the quality (and, he 
says, the length) of his life came directly out of stuff developed for 
the space program. reliable fuel cells are another space-program 
invention. 

| > it provides returns in a whole
| > lot of areas; indeed, the space exploration itself turns out to be
| > a small percentage of it.
|
| Then why not focusing directly on those areas, and save a few gallons
| of liquid oxygen and hydrogen while doing it ?

people are perfectly free to do that, even as they were free to develop 
a huge computer network, but didn't, until darpa financed it. there is 
also a matter of economics of scale. considering again the insulin pump 
mentioned above: presuming that someone had the idea, the development 
and manufacturing costs would have been prohibitive to produce just an 
insulin pump. but one big program, such as a space program, results in 
thousands and thousands of spinoffs, and the portion of the development 
costs for each is much smaller, making access to them much easier.

| Aren't there plenty of "impossible" things worth doing on the surface
| of the Earth already ?

sure. and if the goal were to identify impossible tasks, your point 
would be a good one. if your thoughts carry you to the solution of 
impossible terrestrial tasks, by all means do it. no one is proposing 
that you do not. for every thing that mankind sets out to do, the 
argument could be made that there are other things worth doing, too. 
and if that argument prevails in each case, the result is paralysis, 
because nothing will ever get done because there are so many other 
things to do.

you're raising an issue of priorities, and that is a valid point, but 
there has been no other program, ever, that has addressed so many of 
the other priorities as has the space program, when it was doing real, 
innovative stuff (again, as opposed to the space shuttle and iss). a 
permanent presence on the moon requires the solution to a multitude of 
problems that have very real counterparts here on the earth but, more 
than that, it requires huge leaps in discovery, not little, incremental 
ones. to use an example i used in the piece thursday, penicillin 
existed, had been discovered, and languished on the lab shelf until 
world war II forced development of a way of producing it in quantity. 
its benefits extended far beyond the war, of course, but only because 
the means of making it had been developed as part of a huge effort 
other than the production of antibiotics.

as to providing additional education, as you mentioned earlier, that is 
not particularly a problem. we need to give all those engineers and 
researchers something to do once they've gotten their educations. and, 
again, a space program is a tremendously cost-effective way of doing 
that.

consider the personal computer. much of what we now do with computers 
came about not because personal computers were developed to perform 
those specific tasks, but because *after* they were developed somebody 
said, "hey -- you know what we could do with these things?" as a 
result, only a small part of what we do with them has anything to do 
with what ibm had in mind when it rolled out the pc.
-- 
dep

It's remarkable how quickly a problem goes away once the people with
a vested interest in there being a problem go away. -- Mark Steyn

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