Hi Billy, On Nov 1, 2010, at 5:07 PM, [email protected] wrote: > I get the clear impression that ( 1 ) you never watch NASA television and > ( 2 ) pretty much could care less what happens with the Space program. > Correct me if I am wrong, but this is what comes across.
Yes. Neither does anyone I know, at least on a professional level. Personally, yes, I have friends who are excited about watching Space Shuttle launches and dream of flying to the moon or mars. But NASA manned flight has absolutely nothing to do with the technology world. The Space Shuttle is 1980's technology. There is a lot of interest in the X-Prize, but hardly anybody in Silicon Valley bids on the kinds of government contracts funded by NASA. > Do I know about "Space opinion" in Silicon country ? Hardly Nor am I at > all > sure how to even find out what it is. But thinking about not only Apple but > Google > and HP and the folks at Stanford and the whole schmeer, my best guess is that > a clear ( or even large ) majority is aghast at the gutting of NASA. Maybe, but it certainly doesn't make the headlines in the local papers. What makes the headlines are private initiatives: http://www.googlelunarxprize.org/ Right or wrong, we in the Valley don't trust the government to create technology for us. We create it ourselves. > FAR from my views being ca 1970s in character, seems to me they are > very much 2010. See below. No idea how to characterize your outlook > but I wouldn't classify it in terms of some past era of Space history. > > I can guess, but that is all, maybe a reflection of concerns with here-and-now > marketing priorities which have little to do at all with Space, possibly you > have some sort of emotional sense that Space focus would compete with > your Earth-o-centric career path and represent unwelcome competition for > common resources, or maybe the source is theological in some sense, > or a function of a bad run-in, in the past, with a Space freak who soured > you > on the idea of Space, or God knows what. These may all be wrong guesses, > but I would be utterly incredulous if your outlook was shared in Silicon > Valley > by more than a minority As often happens, you are conflating my response to two different issues. 1. There may be valid emotional and psychological reasons for governments to go into space and mars, and many people in Silicon Valley would support that vision. 2. But from a pure technology development point-of-view, NASA manned space flight isn't interesting to us, and no major corporation I know cares at all about the impact on their R&D from NASA's woes. I was disagreeing with your assertions about the latter, not the former. I do think it is a tragedy that Obama killed manned space flight without actively promoting a better alternative, and in retrospect i was wrong to defend him. He really seems to be acting out of either vengeance or (more likely) the modern liberal's distaste for non-reditsributive spending. But professionally speaking, NASA's maned programs are an evolutionary dead end in terms of technology, and they desperately need a fresh start. The shame isn't that he killed the space shuttle. The shame is that he didn't invest real R&D into something that _would_ advance the state of the art. -- Ernie P. -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
