Darpa Shows Off Some Things You Can Do with Distributed Electric Propulsion
1st thought: wow, cool stuff!<p>2nd thought: too bad it's gonna be military use first. I've often heard the argument being made that military applications (and even war itself) somehow drive innovation.
While that may be true to an extent, it always rang hollow to me as an argument. Why should civil life always just get the "crumbs" of science and engineering? Why not turn it around, spend most of the research money <i>and brain time</i> on things that benefit everyone (in the US, and worldwide) and then see which of those technologies can be repurposed for the military, not the other way around?<p>DARPA alone has a bigger budget than NASA, and I just googled "us military research budget" and the numbers for all the arms of the US military are quite staggering, really.