| In a way you are both right. There are currently two aspects of the American space industry. One, the moribund aerospace giants that are largely just making the same old rockets, entrenched in their job creation programs. And two, the new space companies, which are making suborbital rocketplanes and cheap boosters. At present, they may not look impressive because of small steps they are taking, but you just have to look at Scaled's Space Ship Two to realize that radical innovation in their design is not dead. This has been a long time coming, and there has been a dark age in aerospace. If you are interested, in my view the seminal event in the new space industry was the Delta Clipper Program (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X). And now there are some really impressive companies trying to make space truly viable for everyone. Some of those companies are. XCOR Aerospace: http://xcor.com/
Scaled Composites: http://scaled.com/
Masten: http://masten-space.com/
Armadillo: http://armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Home Aside from aerospace. While I agree that there have been game changers like the cell phone, I do agree with Kasparov that there is an atmosphere of risk aversion. For instance I don't see any daring research programs like when DARPA funded Engelbart's augment research that led to Human User Interface objects like the mouse. And that disturbs me. Often visionaries look very crazy or at best very hard to understand because they are operating out of the scope of our context. I don't see people having the patience for these visionaries. And the people who do claim to be visionaries seem to have very conservative imaginations. |