Cray1 Anniversary Event September 21st 4561

Do not mistake the race to the Moon with the compilation of the Strategic Arsenal. The former is called the space program. The latter was called deterrence and a number of other names for brief suborbital flights (an atmosphere biased word). The former had a few dozen launch vehicles (I was just as a space conference) with little electronics while the latter had 1054 land based and over 650 sea based reasonably autonomous ballistic vehicles. Pots of money are still being thrown to "Strategic defense" with marginal pay off. Cray and Kelly Johnson and a few others both showed that a few smart people out thought big teams of many people (yet for the sake of democracy we still believe in this). Military developed hardware is a mixed bag. Some of it works. So works particularly well. Some stuff doesn't work at all. Some stuff works poorly. Many airlines started with DC-3s (C-47s), but that didn't mean that the C-5 would be commercialized. What it does mean is that products generally improve when larger numbers get made when there is record keeping and a sense of improvement (this too is a purely idealistic generalization which I could shoot down).

So do most wars. Depends how much you like to be on edge.

--