We need the NIH, we need the NSF, we need CERN, now more than ever. Basic science is the only way to get significantly more return from a dollar invested, but nobody wants to pay upfront. That is why we need taxpayer funding in basic science. Scientific breakthroughs will yield such massive dividends in the long run, that citizens would literally be spending on their own well being in a way that would otherwise be impossible. Discoveries such as vaccines, antibiotics, surgery, genetics and others have allowed humans to enjoy a standard of living unfathomable even a hundred years ago.
If politicians had any vision whatsoever, they would have instigated a New Deal with massive investment in scientific and engineering research projects. Yet what did they do? Feed banks infinite loans at prime to keep them afloat, so that banks can choose to continue lending on a profit driven schedule.
Guess who gets loans at prime from banks? Not the NIH, that's for sure.
Oh really? Where did he study engineering? When did he take the FE exam?
That's not a term that you can throw around all willy-nilly, especially in the context of hardware. Next, are you about to tell me that the CEO of Ford is also an engineer?
The term "engineer" does not imply chartered/professional status in current popular usage.
Musk, on the other hand, holds a degree in physics. He started a PhD program on applied physics, but quit to pursue his entrepreneurial interests. If you judge engineers purely from an educational perspective, then yes, Musk is not an engineer.
Nonetheless, if we look at wikipedia's description of what "Engineer" means, we get:
> An engineer is a professional practitioner of engineering, concerned with applying scientific knowledge, mathematics, and ingenuity to develop solutions for technical problems.
So, by this definition, Musk is an engineer...
Although I do take issue with the above (happiness & growth) usage of the term, I'm completely fine with Elon calling himself an engineer because he actually did study engineering (albeit informally) via books, etc.
this
1. Used to identify a specific person or thing close at hand or being
indicated or experienced
1.1 Used to introduce someone or something
1.2 Referring to the nearer of two things close to the speaker (the other,
if specified, being identified by ‘that’)
2. Referring to a specific thing just mentioned
3. Used to identify a specific person or thing close at hand or being
indicated or experienced:
Notably, the very definition you posted makes no mention of that usage. From that definition there is no way to tell if "This" on its own means "This predeceeding comment is completely wrong" or "This predeceeding comment is completely right".
Also, "precisely" indicates degree rather than the generalist term "this". For example, "I'll meet you at this time tomorrow" and "I'll meet you at precisely this time tomorrow" have different connotations for how accurate you are expecting to be.
Like this?
After all, SpaceX's plans for a reusable rocket are certainly more ambitious than anything governments have been doing for the last several decades.
It is undeniably government funded, backed, and run research that has fostered the technological "magic" we see today. I wrote "undeniable" because it is a fact--not a conjecture, opinion, or item subject to debate. Government funded and government run research programs created our space-age technology (literally) and the internet, and fueled a great percentage of the other developments that have advanced our technology so rapidly in the last several decades.
Private companies (whether held privately or publicly traded) are mainly creatures of fear and risk aversion--even the ones that are relatively less so than others. There's nothing especially "bleeding edge" about SpaceX or Tesla, or just about anything else Musk has been involved with. Historically, it has usually taken a great thrust by the government to make big advances, whether through subsidies (i.e. corporate welfare) or direct involvement (NASA/DARPA).
Saying that corporations are risk-averse followers is inane. Governments broadly fund a great deal of seed-level research. Sometimes they develop applications based upon it. Sometimes corporations get there first.
We're seeing an instance of the latter with SpaceX, I think.
Aside from that, your statement about a fully-reusable rocket may technically be true (I suspect that NASA actually has investigated a 100%-reusable rocket, but don't know for sure), but it is trivial and unsupportive of your point, since the concept isn't ground-breaking (the shuttle was completely reusable, even if the delivery system was only partially reusable) or even very risky, given the decades of research and engineering that the government has put into space rocket technology. That was, in fact my point. "Being conservative and risk-averse" is not synonymous with "never does anything new."
EDIT: And what's with the fixation on reusable rockets? It might lower some cost but it's hardly an amazing feat of science and engineering.
Elon Musk runs engineering companies. They are certainly not at "the absolute bleeding edge" of science though.
If you want to fund science, then fund science. Scientists and their graduate students actually do work at the bleeding edge of science and routinely push beyond it with only a small, small, fraction of what these billionaires make.