NASA has funded a bunch of early stage technologies | Hacker News Reader

NASA has funded a bunch of early stage technologies

orbitalindex.com

101 pointstectonic28 comments

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NASA has developed all sorts of stuff over the decades:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spinoff_technologies

Most of the modern technologies that we use in recent years has had initial funding from government:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entrepreneurial_State

* https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/17987621

This includes early bootstrapping of the Silicon Valley ecosystem:

* https://steveblank.com/secret-history/

The gov't made the iPhone basically. I mean think about it:

  * GPS — government technology
  * the internet — a government technology
  * ai voice assistants — Apple literally hired the head of this research straight from DARPA after DARPA had released its work to the public
  * touchscreens — DARPA
  * accelerometers — DARPA
  * speech recognition — more DARPA and MIT tech
  * digital cameras - Bell Labs which had a government enforced monopoly that required them to fund and release research

I don't know why the myth that private sector entities create technologies is so pervasive. Why would a company invest so much into research just to release it to their competitors? The only research that drives everything forward comes from the public sector.

If you'd like a more thorough historical breakdown, I'd recommend economist Mariana Mazzucato's book on debunking public vs. private sector myths.

https://marianamazzucato.com/books/the-entrepreneurial-state

> I don't know why the myth that private sector entities create technologies is so pervasive

Money pays to protect money, so all sorts of convenient myths are part of the common knowledge.

Privatization is destroying the world. Capitalism is only a plausible economic system under heavy regulation and governments with more power than the corporations.

It's only in the US that "libertarian" is associated with being pro-capitalist. In pretty much every other country it's inherently recognized that capitalism requires a massive state so libertarianism is considered a far left ideology that is anti-capitalist

What countries? I live in New Zealand and at least here, in Australia and in the UK libertarianism is a politically right ideology that's tightly wound with capitalism. In which countries is it a politically left ideology? It's certainly not true that your description is a uniquely American point of view.

The more I read stuff like this the more I realize all countries on Earth should pay thanks to the USA and all the great advances it has gifted the world with. And I'm not being facetious it's really crazy just how much advances in the United States have forwarded technological progress. Please tell every seething European to thank America for keeping them safe from Russia too.

I’m not ungrateful but I’m also not convinced it isn’t the product of having significant power over most of the planet such that wealth and resources in order to fund and sustain R&D are easily obtained. A tremendous amount of brain drain occurs due to the USA as well, and has for a very long time. The knowledge and skill going into these accomplishments isn’t all native to American soil.

So I wonder. Is it really the USA simply being the best or is it globalism with one very powerful player reaping the most rewards? Kind of a right time, right place situation. Perhaps in both cases you might think thanks are still in order.

The magic is partially the wealth, but more a sense of transparent, free, public research. Moreso, peel back the layers and find the 1st or 2nd generation immigrant scientists, educated USA or abroad, who came here, obtained citizenship or LPR status, and helped create both this collaborative culture and the discoveries themselves (maybe not in that order). Yes, it is a global effort, and yes, USA deserves credit for creating and fostering creation.

Right time, right place. Europe was wrecked after WWII.

> The more I read stuff like this the more I realize all countries on Earth should pay thanks to the USA and all the great advances it has gifted the world with.

Before the US was the UK with the industrial revolution. After that it was DE with a lot of science (many of the important journals were in German pre-WW2) and chemistry. For the latter, and how the UK dropped the ball on having a chemical industry, see the book Mauve:

* https://www.simongarfield.com/books/mauve/

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/580291.Mauve

Just because the US has carried the baton recently doesn't mean others haven't.

These systems are typically developed in public-private partnerships. This is not really the same thing as "the government" creating it. The projects or technologies are typically evaluated by studies which, even if classified, are frequently conducted by private corporations contracted by the government; the research is undertaken by a mix of government and industrial labs; and then manufacturing is generally (though not always) undertaken wholly by private enterprises.

The government and industry both have a role to play. Maybe part of the reason the myth persists is because it is simpler to believe it's one way or the other -- government creates technology or private business creates technology -- than to think in terms of the more complex reality.

Governments are good at pure science, research, and individual technologies. They are not good at making products. That is fundamentally where private companies have a massive advantage.

NASA hired Cygnus (our first customer!) while we were figuring out how to do what we planned to do. The open source world would look quite different had they not!

We had a couple of key customers like that who hired us despite ourselves. NASA hired us and told us how to do our job. Intel hired us because they needed an alternate compiler to their official one for the i960 (they needed it to exist, it didn't have to work). We knew how to port gcc, gdb etc, but we didn't know how to do the job (i.e. send the reports and updates that a big corp needs). McGeedy flew down, read us the riot act and told us how to do our jobs.

A few customers like that and we had it down pat.

NASA has been consistently contributing to open-source and open data ecosystem:

NASA and open-source software:

https://lwn.net/Articles/923223/

HN post on the matter:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34815383

Very interesting projects. Some youtubers have been recreating and iterating on the electroaerodynamic thrusters in the solid-state propulsion project:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yftKjkZHirc

There's also this one I been watching! https://www.youtube.com/@rptechlab/videos

Also Astra sells one too (I read they bought the company and it's like their only revenue generator currently) https://astra.com/space-products/astra-spacecraft-engine/

I really want to see Titan's lake before I die. It's the only stable, landable liquid in solar system (besides Earth), how it is not a priority?!

I think drilling miles under ice is a mission most likely to fail on our first attempts. It’s the one project I want done but know it might not even happen in the next 50 years.

It may be easier on Titan, the gravitational constant is smaller, so less downhole bore pressure.

Or you can just land on one of the open lakes.

Probably because they already sent Huygens and there's planets and moons that haven't been landed on yet at all (i.e. almost all of them). Titan's one of the rare exceptions.

List's actually shockingly short: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_landings_on_extraterre...

Historically, just getting anything to another planet costs in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Perseverance launch alone cost $243 million (total mission cost was $2.7 billion). It is an enormous expenditure.

You might be interested that Rocket Lab's Electron now can launch small interplanetary spacecraft for low-eight figures (~$10 million for the launch to lunar orbit for NASA CAPSTONE, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPSTONE#Launch).

However, the Electron payload capacity is small (a few hundred KGs). I doubt it is enough for much equipment, but I believe a camera/radio/parachute is feasible. Take these prices with a big grain of salt, as I am just a hobbyist, but now you can get a spacecraft to an interplanetary body for probably around $20-$30 million dollars. As costs fall and other next-gen rockets become operational, I am hopeful that we see more interplanetary landings over the coming decades.

(disclosure, I am a RKLB shareholder.)

Because we burn our space budget on useless and expensive human spaceflight, in the false belief that only manned missions can get the public excited about space.

> The US government has funded a bunch of early stage technologies

Regarding title: FTFY

The US government is probably the most successful venture capitalist in history.

Scott Galloway defends this thesis admirably: https://www.profgalloway.com/welfare-queens/

I have a sneaking suspicion that the semiconductor industry as we know it would not exist without copious and frequent government funding.

For sure whether directly or indirectly. I don't think we'd be where we are without Eniac. I wouldn't be surprised if most of Intel's early customers where in some way or shape related to NASA or DARPA/Defense. IBM got its start also by selling hardware and software to the government. Even though those may not be semiconductors as we see today, we wouldn't have gotten the innovation of semiconductors, at least as early as we did, without the government essentially bootstrapping computing on scale.

Intel specifically, I couldn't say. But the government was a huge early customer of SV chip companies - particularly those that had to do with optics. The USA proudly (but quietly) had the best spy satellites in the world for decades, and the semiconductor industry was a big factor in why they did. Maybe still do - hard to know exactly without a hell of a lot of security clearances.

Highly recommend Steve Blanks "Secret History of Silicon Valley" for more on this:

https://steveblank.com/secret-history/?amp

Astopharmacology sounds so cool, especially the use of microorganisms to synthesize medicines. I wonder how those drugs will mutate as the organisms go through breeding cycles..

I initially misread the title as "NASA has FOUND...", and my mind went spiraling for a little bit.

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