sci.research.careers

Today is the 50th anniversary of the space age.
Government funding of science R&D got its start during WWII,
continued afterwards, but was waning, until the shock of
the sputnik launch woke things up and funding really increased.
I guess this helped my interest in science because in the 60s and 70s
this result in a whole seried of quality high school science textbooks
and course materials. If you look at some of the pre-Sputnik
textbooks,
they are pretty staid and often outdated.

Like many other government of investor big money programs,
the large influx of money probably resulted in a "science bubble"
with too many scientists chasing too few positions to this day.
That caused a lot of pain, but at least "science" is still larger than
it would have been without federal support. And the bubble burst
was even worse in collapse of the Soviet Union.

My big sadness is that things did not turn out like 2001: Space
Odyssey.
Filmed two years before the first moon landing it painted an
optimistic
future for the space program, if you ignore the aliens and neurotic
computers.
All of that was acheiveable if Earth its act in order. Soon the US
manned
space program will go on a 5-7 year hiatus between the decommission of
the shuttle
and the implementation of Orion. Incidentally the Orion is being
designed
two miles from where I am typing this. Its kind of the the "elepahnt
in the living
room" sucking up huge technological talent in this area. The buzz is
Orion
is progressing pretty well, but as a big government bureaucracy it
willl achieve
its goals late.