Welcome to Tesla Motors Club
Discuss Tesla's Model S, Model 3, Model X, Model Y, Cybertruck, Roadster and More.
Register

Energy Moonshot

This site may earn commission on affiliate links.
I wonder what they consider military R&D since a lot of money for basic science research comes from the military. I have friends in medicine that get DoD funding working on bone growth and artificial retinas. The work I do is essentially basic semiconductor physics, but has applications in spintronics and quantum computation, which gets a lot of money from DARPA. The Free Electron Laser I used got most of it's funding from the Air Force and the Navy. (The Air Force funded it for medical research and the Navy hopes to someday put them on submarines to blow up incoming torpedoes.) DARPA, among other things, also funds AI and robotics (yes, they are building Skynet :wink:). Even LIGO, a project to detect gravity waves, got initial funding from the military since some DoD folks thought they might be able to use it to weigh spy satellites that passed overhead.

Anyhow, my point is that there is a lot of research money that comes under the umbrella of military R&D, but has broad civilian applications. I'm sure there is military money that goes into researching energy as well.
 
Last edited:
Even LIGO, a project to detect gravity waves, got initial funding from the military since some DoD folks thought they might be able to use it to weigh spy satellites that passed overhead.

Detectable gravity waves from spy satellites? Sounds like a long shot! They will have to upgrade to "Advanced LIGO" to detect colliding black holes, much less spy satellites. Anyone interested in gravity waves would likely enjoy the following books:

Theory:

Catching the Gravitational Wave

Experiment:

Amazon.com: Gravity's Shadow: The Search for Gravitational Waves: Harry Collins: Books

GSP