The garage rocket revolution

bitoflife.mkronline.com

3 points·mkr-hn··4 comments

I'm almost with him on this: it looks like the amateur rocket folks are getting performance like von Braun and company were getting in 1939, but they have better electronics.

My thought is that any better performance will cause them to start to run afoul of various 3-letter agencies. Any better guidance systems will cause the US government to suppress them fairly quickly, as they'll be intruding on (1) the defence contractor's monopoly on flying fast, and (2) the government monopoly on shooting down flying things.

A lot of these efforts are getting funding straight from the government or companies that get substantial government funding. I think private and public interests are on the same page for once.

The article is pretty light on details but I can see the analogy being drawn between home-built computers and home-built rockets. Doesn't all technology eventually become commonplace? We lament the state of education, but look at the expanded amount of information that must be learned. What an amazing machine.

The trajectory of education seems to be that hard subjects become basic as we get better at teaching them. Especially as applications in technology make them easier to understand. A lot of stuff we call basic math today used to be the pinnacle of mathematics.

It's a running gag in the various Star Trek series that people learn how to build warp drives (and other very advanced things) in high school.

Paraphrasing a time travel episode: "in my time [the future] there's a [technobabble] in every desk."

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