Guden Oden said:
$1bn poured into private enterprise may not yield the best results due to profitability concerns (though the companies would naturally have to use the money the way they're supposed to be used rather than just create some money-making scheme for the company). Instead, give it to a university, the big ones have very high-class research institutes (at least in Sweden they do).
When was the last time a university built a launcher and launched something into orbit? Publishing papers is one thing, building a communications satellite and launcher is another. The issue isn't just basic research of particle physics. The issue is engineering and production, a much more complicated and expensive field.
Students go to college to learn the theory of building bridges. But universities don't build bridges. Then they go in the real world and have to design a real bridge. It's a wholly different enterprise. Universities produce a set of inputs to the R&D process, but they are not the end of it.
A student fresh out of college, for example, would not have the neccessarily experience applying hardware design knowledge to make a chip like the NV40 or R400. There is knowledge gained in the process of actually trying to turn something from fantasy into reality. There is a difference between knowing how pieces of a puzzle work, and being able to assemble them into something.
Military research means most of that huge pile of money will turn into a few expensive toys for the military, like depleted uranium-firing chainguns or cruise missiles or a tank firing system that sees through fog or whatever, and maybe one spin-off tech into the civilian field.
One spinoff? The world you live in today is dominated by military spinoffs in virtually everyfield. Mapping and cartography, Military. The whole field of satellite communications, TV, and GPS would not exist if not for the ICBM programs. Radio and radar: Military. Don't tell me the University of Sweden, suitably funded, would have done it. Microwave communications? Military. Computers? Built to compute artillery trajectories and crack ciphers. Commercial airliners? An offshoot of troop and materiel carriers. Kevlar and other carbon composites? Military.
We need universities to research the fundamental science behind these things. But there is a big difference between a University discovering say, new forms of carbon (compostes, fullerines, nanotubes), and making a bunch of them to measure properties, and producing an aircraft wing, a car, or spaceship fuel tank in a way that can viably be mass manufactured.
We don't expect universities to be involved in manufacturing things, and there is knowledge gained in making things that cannot otherwise be acquired by simply designing on paper.
The military, private business, and universities do different kinds of research. All are valuable. The idea that the university model could handle inventing everything is lunacy.
