NIAC at NASA 12 Jun 2009 Frank Sietzen at NASA Watch (a great blog, by the way) has asked if the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) should be revived. Most of his readers say yes. NIAC was where they came up with designs for wacky spacesuits, propulsion systems, and so on. It was poached to pay for the idiotic (there! I said it) COTS program by former head Mike Griffin. I think something like this is needed, but it needs to be where political, both internal and external, interests cannot reach it, so I suggest situating it at a suitable university with separate funding. NASA’s ability to look forward has always been compromised by military and political interests, and most of its disasters have been due also to this. What do you think, dear readers? Politics Technology
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Not unless they employ philosophers, which is a bad bet for an engineering project. No, I was thinking of ASU, which has a large space project going on (they did the Mars Rovers), or someone like that.
Could the aforementioned philosopher maybe offer perspective on the ROI between sending delicate bipeds into space vs. an armada of much cheaper but insensible robots? I mean anyway, whether there’s an institute or not.
That, too, is something NIAC could consider. I personally think that near-earth human space travel is a good thing. Interplanetary is something else.