OSTIblog Articles in the Bureau of Mines Topic

The Successes of Government Science and Technology

Theodore Roosevelt, in his famous speech “Citizenship In A Republic” starts by saying “it is not the critic who counts;” What makes the speech poignant is that all too often it is the critic who counts because we see time and time again the media pointing out “how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.”

Too often we only hear about failures and waste in government, yet the contributions and success of government-funded science and technology are ubiquitous and often under-reported.

Anyone who is old enough remembers President Nixon making a phone call from the oval office to Neil Armstrong on the moon. At the time, it was an almost superhuman feat of engineering. Yet today no teenager would be amazed because today they can take a cell phone out of theirpocket and place a call to the international space station…if we only knew the number. In fact, school children routinely have video conferences with our astronauts as part of NASA’s policy. The NASA space program of the 1960s helped make modern communications possible. By helping to create the integrated circuits and by re-purposing the missile technology of the cold war to launch satellites, NASA engineers deserve special praise. They deserve to be in the Hall of Fame. In my mind they already are.

A topic also not receiving the fanfare it deserves was recently noted by Pete Domenici, senior fellow at the Bipartisan Policy...

Related Topics: Bureau of Mines, communications, hydraulic fracturing, nasa, nuclear weapons technology, Oil Shale