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Comment by brutusborn | Hacker News Reader

I remember listening to a talk where the presenter suggested the history of radio telescopes development was driven by the need for intelligence gathering. The telescopes could be used for spying but were justified on a scientific basis.

I imagine a lot of space development is similar. The real reason for the huge investment is for defence applications, but it is more acceptable to justify it by the scientific ‘value’ of the projects.

If you asked someone if they wanted $1billion to go to health research or space research the answer would be obvious.

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> If you asked someone if they wanted $1billion to go to health research or space research the answer would be obvious.

Honestly this depends. If we have 1000 billion going into health research, but 1 billion doing into space research, I think there's an open question on how much good an extra 0.1% of health research will do compared to doubling space research.

In absolute terms instead of relative, I would prefer a billion on most space based research than a billion going to study male pattern baldness.

The US actually built at least 9 Hubble Space Telescopes, they're just not called that: they're called Keyhole surveillance satellites.

The size and shape of the Hubble is directly influenced by those satellites, and in particular the surprisingly cheap main mirror optics provided you built a mirror of exactly a particular size that it would turn out there was a very experienced and equipped facility in the US for building.

What kind of resolution would these have, being pointed at the surface of the Earth in optimal conditions? Enough to identify someone viewed at an angle?

In that case it's the opposite though: science taking an almost free ride on the coattails of spending that was originally budgeted as military.

It is very possible that the research and development cost was much larger than the production cost of the duplicates. In this way the scientific funding is still being used to ‘hide’ defence funding. Externally it looks like most of the money went to science applications but that science was necessary for the production of the non-Hubble telescopes.

Pretty much all serious science spending is actually military spending. People don't always like to admit that, though, even when it's obvious.

More so when it's not obvious.

Here's that talk:

"Secret History of Silicon Valley" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo

Thanks!

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