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.