u s government and technolgy investment people who criticize big government and its projects rarely seem to have a consistent view of the role of government in science and technology basically the u s government has gotten into the role of supporting research which private industry finds too expensive or too long term historically this role for the u s gov t was forced upon it because of socialism in other countries in order for u s industries to compete with government subsidized foreign competitors the u s gov t has taken on the role of subisizing big ticket or long lead r d as a republican i abhor the necessity for our government to involve itself in technology this way i believe that market forces should drive technology and the world would be a better place for it but the whole world would have to implement this concept simultaneously or some countries would have subsidized r d while others would not so the u s must subsidize because everybody else does this sounds a lot like the farm subsidies arguments behind our gatt negotiations doesn t it but this role of government subsidies is antithetical to cost effectiveness the general idea is to spend money on new technology and thereby maintain and promote our technological culture despite the forces in the business world like the dreaded quarterly earnings report which erode the ability of u s industry to invest in new technology and since our goal is to spend money it makes little sense to try to save money of course we could always spend our money more wisely but everybody disagrees about that the wisdom should be it s interesting to note that some of our best tools for cost control available in industry today were derived from government projects gantt charts cp m and most of the modern scheduling software comes from dod projects and their contractors the construction industry has taken these tools to the core of their businesses every large construction project now uses these tools ken jenks nasa jsc gm space shuttle program office kjenks gothamcity jsc nasa gov a scientist can discover a new star but he cannot make one he would have to ask an engineer to do that gordon l glegg american engineer
