It's official: NASA is a jobs program.

Re:It's official: NASA is a jobs program. by Maciek416 on Tuesday August 18, 2009 @08:49AM (#770309)

This reminds me of the talk Robert Bussard gave at Google a while back, mentioning the relative efficacy and nimbleness of fusion research programs: his own small-scale, Navy-funded, evolutionary on-the-cheap effort versus the absolutely massive, multi-billion dollar ITER project. He describes the ITER project as a gigantic "rice bowl", whose primary goal is not to discover anything but rather to give a large number of people jobs.

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Re:It's official: NASA is a jobs program. by mnemonicsloth on Tuesday August 18, 2009 @09:42AM (#770407)

For contrast with ITER, see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=737074 ("A Fusion Startup")

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Re:It's official: NASA is a jobs program. by Maciek416 on Tuesday August 18, 2009 @09:54AM (#770428)

Thanks for that link. Relative to the story, this would also bring up examples of companies like Armadillo Aerospace and the other small-scale space startups. One thing that you might argue the space startups are not necessarily doing that NASA is doing is scientific research outside of spaceflight-related topics. General Fusion (the company in mnemonicsloth's link) would seem to be a sort of hybrid of these two extremes.. though extremely risky business-wise.

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