What saddens me about this story is the real but largely unexamined cost of war -- the appropriation of talent for projects with no positive impact on humanity. Yes, this satellite project was valuable in that it perhaps helped avoid future wars. However, what benefits could we all have received from the work of these obviously talented engineers? I'm not suggesting that such a satellite program was not a good governmental decision given the state of the world -- just that, in the absence of such adversarial relationships between countries, these engineers could have made the world a much better place somehow. We might mock the allocation of engineering talent to the latest group shopping or social networking "fad", but at least people are getting some possible benefit.
In a way you might as well fantasize about trees that grow sandwiches. We have to take what we're given in this world and that includes the nature of mankind and the many faults of human civilization. We should rightly strive to better the state of the world as much as we can but I don't think it's overly helpful to haul around an excessive amount of angst about human-kind being imperfect.
Wars are often caused by faulty intelligence, of the “oh, yeah, we can take this territory in a week” variety. I’m not a big fan of the defense establishment, but keeping an eye on our opponents’ capabilities is one of the more benign forms of defense spending.
there is a certain value in at least halting regression, in my opinion. if your work did not advance the sum of human knowledge, then did it at least keep the fires burning a little longer? then it was not a waste, in my opinion.
also, if it makes you feel any better, these projects tend to have a way of trickling down/out knowledge...
There's a soft-libertarian guy who runs some private UK collage, who claims that public R&D (which would include defence) does nothing but crowd out private R&D. If Bill Gates could have made more in a cushy job writing cruise missile code (or supervising contractors doing it) than running a scrappy little coding shop, he probably would have so.
