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Comment by john_moscow | Hacker News Reader

>Uber and the Army's research lab expect to spend a combined total of $1 million in funding for this research; this funding will be divided equally between each party.

That's about 8 person-years in salary. Given Uber's scale that doesn't make any sense.

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Probably just a way to grease the wheels and start the sharing of knowledge between parties. If Uber succeeds in becoming a serious aeronotics lab then the government will definetly want to collaborate, might make sense to get some ties established now?

Could it be a front for some other kind of deal? It sounds a bit paranoid but if it's classified they wouldn't tell us anyway.

I work one level up from the lab, but they probably wouldn't tell me either because I don't have a need to know. That said, if there are classified angles to something I at least usually know what to avoid bringing up. Nothing like that with this partnership. Our command has more than 500 formal partnerships, and this deals with one of the Army's top modernization priorities (future vertical lift).

Most probably from government side this is purely a bold "In case these guys manage to do it we don't want the tech to fall to hands of <insert random country> so let's get contract on their R&D now and keep eye on it. If they succeed we'll push for exclusivity and if they fail, well it's a million, who cares. We're already some 20 trillion in debt so pish posh."

It was a 500k match not 1 million.

lot less than that actually that's a small 3-4 person team

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