On: Most Americans think NASA’s $10B space telescope is a good investment

[felipemnoa]

>>but presumably it'd have been several orders of magnitude cheaper to just directly invest in that tech instead of building a weapon.

True, but virtually nobody would be motivated by just directly investing on the tech instead of an exciting fighter jet.

[ISL → felipemnoa]

I don't know if you've ever met any ... aircraft metallurgists, for example, but holy poops are they motivated by doing anything awesome with advanced alloys.

[felipemnoa → ISL]

Yeah, but you need to motivate the people that will be footing the bill and also the ones that approve the budget. The tax payers, the legislators...

The regular person will not care about technical stuff like that, but they will care about a shiny new fighting yet.

[WalterBright → ISL]

I'm an engineer, and I'm motivated by the end product, not the just inventing a machine.