Hacker News Reader

I think it's hard for a civilian agency to use the defence sectors tricks. NASA could probably get a lot of people behind building a giant laser on the moon to "strike the enemy", but it's hard to see how they could get much support from the science community for such a project.

View on HN

Au contraire. Just scatter around the components of the project into various Congressional districts. Build large facilities in places with political horsepower and name them after important people. Gemini/Apollo is fraught with this.

Personally, I doubt that the science community would be behind manned space travel in any case. It's more marketed to the engineering and military world. I wouldn't doubt that internal NASA competition over limited dollars shows astronomers and planet scientists smothering the manned efforts in it's crib now and again.

Laser interferometry for astronomy. Just spec the lasers out so that they're useful for science, but can double as a weapon in a pinch.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com