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Comment by thomasmeeks | Hacker News Reader

We could not have GPS, and still be trying to fly planes over other countries. I'm a fan of cost reduction, but it is more nuanced than this.

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Sure, there is plenty of dual purpose stuff. Think of the Hubble as a Keyhole pointing the other way. But in general money spent on defense is spent in ways that make me wonder if we could not do something more useful with it. And a world with GPS could be more annoying than a world with say better education. And then you might end up launching those GPS satellites anyway, but from a different bucket and a little later.

Piggy-backing stuff onto the military budget that is dual use is a nice fig leaf but it does not reduce the component spent on the remainder: weapons of all sorts, kinds and shapes.

> Think of the Hubble as a Keyhole pointing the other way.

I still remember one discussion on NRO where an user mentioned that it donated a space telescope to NASA [0], built around the same time as Hubble, that had better specs. And that's the spare one!

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O...

That was fascinating! Thank you for sharing the link.

The one thing we've proven over the last 40 years is you don't get better education by throwing money at it. Here in California we spend, in constant dollar, twice what we spent per pupil in 1970. Test scores are flat.

Could we not have invented GPS through completely civilian subsidies?

Sure DARPA produces civilian applicable research as a side effect, but what about directly funding civilian research instead?

Probably not. The compelling use cases for the first 20 years of GPS were all military with a few survey applications essentially riding free. The equipment used to be many, many pounds and tens of thousands of dollars. Almost every other industry besides had a "better" short term solution to location that met their needs at a fraction of the initial price of GPS.

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