Then, during the Cold War, the Pentagon oversaw the development of a new myriad of technologies, including, most fatefully, the Internet. As it happens, the 50th anniversary of the first Internet message comes up this year, too—on October The commercial value of all those inventions, suitably transferred, is to be measured in many trillions of dollars.
Yet at the same time, the evidence was overwhelming that during World War II Uncle Sam was doing more right than wrong. Much of it, in fact, was discovered and documented by the Truman Committee , chaired by Sen. Harry Truman. The Missourian was so much admired for his work on waste-watching that he was nominated for vice president in , and in the following year, he ascended to the presidency. So as we can see, public-private mechanisms work best with robust oversight, in keeping with our overall system of checks and balances.
So to those who say that the federal government is always stupid, we can say, No, the government is only stupid when we let it be stupid. In the more than six decades of its existence, NASA has mostly had a unique sense of mission. That is, the space agency has relied on a triple cocktail of effectiveness: one part patriotic desire to win for America, one part idealistic desire to serve humanity, one part geeky desire to do something awesomely cool.
And they also knew that, yes, necessity is the mother of invention. Planetary News. Launius, editors. Societal Impact of Spaceflight. Minor Planet Center. June, 8, Planetary Defense Conference Exercise — Health and Medicine, pages The Value of the Moon. Smithsonian Books. Page June View as Online Magazine. In this edition. A New Vision for Space. Millennials and the New Space Age. Ripon Profile of Jessica Millan Patterson. The Senate is set to pass a massive bipartisan tech and manufacturing bill that takes on China.
View All Events. But the agency has also encouraged the spark of genius that comes from individual inventors. Significantly, both ways of doing business have resulted in remarkable technical innovations that have served to advance progress in aeronautics research, space science and space exploration as well as benefit people on Earth.
Photo credit: Cirrus Aircraft. As famed heart surgeon Dr. It has as its goal to explore space. And anytime you have any type of intensive research organization or activity going on, new knowledge is going to flow from it. We see it when weather satellites warn us of coming hurricanes, or when satellites provide information critical to understanding our environment and the effects of climate change.
We see it when we use an ATM or pay for gas at the pump with an immediate electronic response via satellite. Technologies developed for exploring space are being used to increase crop yields and to search for good fishing regions at sea.
The act requires that NASA provide the widest practicable and appropriate dissemination of information concerning its activities and results. It also provides NASA with the authority to patent inventions to which it has title. Thus far, NASA has documented more than 1, spinoff success stories. But, there is another side to the story.
At that time, no one could have anticipated a connection between, say, the International Space Station and restoration of 19th century paintings, between the imaging of Mars and ancient Roman manuscripts, or between astronauts heading to the moon and the safety of the food we eat every day. Nor did they imagine how many thousands of lives would be saved by space-aided search and rescue or by the aforementioned hurricane prediction or by numerous hospital technologies derived from NASA research.
When, where and by whom cannot be known — nor how different such developments might have been without the interaction of multiple advances in multiple areas, freely shared, within what has been, in the history of human advancements, the blink of an eye.
But there is also no doubt that space is a unique environment, demanding rapid innovation and new ways of thinking, with little tolerance for error. And these demands reward all of us when they spurred creativity and technological invention. NASA research aimed at keeping astronauts healthy far from Earth holds great promise for people on Earth. Photo credit: CMAS.
The areas in which NASA-developed technologies benefit society can broadly be defined as: health and medicine, transportation, public safety, consumer goods, environmental and agricultural resources, computer technology and industrial productivity.
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