[angersock]

You aren't giving enough credit to engineering. Science is all well and good, as is basic research, but honestly engineering is what carries the day.

People who fetishsize -~=!SCIENCE!=~- and ignore the sheer quality of engineering that the US produces are frankly fools.

I don't mind losing big projects like the supercolliders or even the goofy NASA stuff if it means that we can let the funds end up in the hands of lean, strong, and awesome engineering teams.

Besides, your supercollider builds no homes, makes few jobs, and really is just a chance for a lot of particle physicists to stroke off on things that aren't really useful to most of mankind. Sorry, but your "science" is super fringe.

[sandfox]

Can't tell if trolling... Or genuinely ignorant. The super-colliders are incredible feats of physical and software engineering, and you guys are building them too! The positive spin-offs are far greater than the stuff that makes it in the headlines of the news.

[mturmon]

"goofy NASA stuff"? This isn't coming across as well-informed.

There's a lot of engineering that goes in to all these spacecraft. The goals are usually scientific (except for tech. demonstrations), but the means are highly coupled to engineering advances -- new sensors, materials, algorithms.