RadioBanter - View Single Post

D Peter Maus · August 21st 07, 10:07 PM posted to rec.radio.shortwave

wrote:
On Aug 21, 3:14 pm, D Peter Maus wrote:
wrote:
On Aug 21, 2:10 pm, D Peter Maus wrote:
Ironic, that the very technology that permits you to publish
worldwide this diatribe about NASA....is a by-product of the space program.- Hide quoted text -
- Show quoted text -
Bull****. The internet would have, and did, evolve with or without the
existence of NASA. It's not surprising that their PR Dept. tries to
lay claim to makiing it all possible - a typical bureaucratic self
congratulatory agrandizement tactic while trying to justify its
existence. Raison d'être!
Take a step back. I'm not talking about the internet. But the
electronics that drives it. THAT is a by-product of the Space Program.

Still bull****. The electronic technology that drives the internet
would have evolved with or without the existence of NASA - llkely
decades sooner had private enterprise and market forces been involved.

Actually, probably not. Without the mission critical pressures, to
create and develop new technolgies, the rate at which the electronics
would have developed through market forces would have been decades longer.

The transistor was invented in 1947. It took nearly a decade before
it was incorporated into a product because market forces are also
possessed of considerable inertia. And then it was trivial applications
like transistor radios. Production was slow, and rejection and failure
rates were high.

However, with mission critical pressures of the space program,
techniques needed to be developed to produce large scale miniaturized
electronics working at frequencies not even considered in terrestrial
applications. Which led to microwave technological innovations on a
grand scale. Driven by lower cost, higher volume, reliable production of
solid state devices, and rapid development of miniaturized computer
driven hardware.

Fuel cell technology had been known since WWII, but had never had a
real application. Practical results in the space program have given us
real world workable fuel cell technologies.

Battery technology developed by orders of magnitude through the space
program.

And medical knowledge has expanded more than a thousand fold through
the space program.

So, though technologies may have developed through commercial
channels, they didn't. They developed through NASA, and the space
program and its allied industries, without the participation of which,
they would likely have developed at a dramatically slower rate, or not
at all.

You employed by the NASA public relations juggernaut per chance?

No. I'm not now, nor have I ever been employed by or for NASA.