Kurt,
I agree with everything you said here but would add to it. Mainly that government should maintain the cycle. IE: Continued funding of research with long term goals in mind, I think that has fallen off with the private sector research funding. The amount of funding has flip flopped in that the private sector does most of the funding. As you said, the seeds of government research seeded the growth in the private sector post WW2. The basic difference between private and government research is that private research is geared for profit, much less than government funded. The Space program is an example, it does make a profit for tax payers, but it has benefited the private business sector greatly. I see the big drop off in government funded research will have negative impact in the future. We still are reaping the benefits of that research spending post WWII. It seems part of the problem, in getting the private sector to pick up the slack on space cuts, is that space exploration is not likely to be profitable. It has been profitable (to ATK etal) because the government funds them. There seems an unwillingness to cut spending (by either party) and with decreased revenue from tax cuts, well I think that was the root of the recent NASA makeover. Erik Erik wrote:
I do doubt the private sector can do what government has done in space, it simply does not produce the profits they desire.
The replacement of private research funds with governmental research for basic research has been one of the positive and important developments in our post-WWII economy. It created so many key inventions to that now dominate the marketplace (e.g. the internet, the first laptop, the integrated chip, global positioning system, portable difibulators). But the government funded basic research model has always been predicated on the idea that once the government takes the initial development risk that the private market is unwilling to take, the technology is transfered to the private market for commercialization (e.g. the internet). For example, in the early 1800s, expansion of U.S. railroads was hindered by any number of technological bugs, most notably the lack of an industrialized Bessmer process to make steel rails. Once the technological teething problems of the railroads were worked out between 1800 and 1840, the United States funded the maturation of the industry through a massive capitalization of the railroads through a right-of-way land grants to the west of Mississippi.
My impression is that the current private space funding effort is an attempt to jump start that commercialization process for space by relatively modest capitalization grants.
IMHO, the underlying problem is the overall flagging of congressional and presidential support for funding basic research with indirect commercialization benefits through space exploration, and the problem is not that congress is trying to capitalize private start-up companies. A place for both still exists. Both can be viewed as different parts of a single economic development program.
Clear Skies - Kurt
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