Asri-unix.650
net.space
utcsrgv!utzoo!decvax!duke!chico!harpo!mhtsa!eagle!ihnss!ucbvax!ARPAVAX:C70:sri-unix!KING@KESTREL
Wed Jan 27 09:17:04 1982
SPACE Digest V2 #89
organizationproperly develop space.  However, this is quite  difficult
for several reasons:
	1) Much of what is necessary to develop space is unpatentable,
often because it  is in  the realm of  pure research.   An example  of
another invention that  grew out of  pure research is  semiconductors,
which of course grew  out of solid state  physics research.  It  would
not have been  possible for a  company to recover  the costs of  their
research, even by patenting the transistor, because other devices were
promptly invented, using the same  physics.  Of course there was  more
than enough profit for everyone, but this isn't always the case.
	2) Patents  are only  good for  seventeen years.   Even  those
pieces of space hardware that are patentable may not reach the peak of
their utilization within seventeen years of conception.
	3) While this may  seem like a pragmatic  rather than a  moral
argument, governments  have  historically  been  involved  in  blazing
trails.  Oil companies drill  for oil on the  ocean floor, but it  was
the US who  invented SCUBA and  exotic gas mixtures.   Railroads is  a
customary example (although the government  probably did more than  it
had to or should have done).
	4) It is reasonable  to suppose that space  is just about  now
turning the corner and should  now be privatized.  This will  probably
bedone in a few  years.  I understand that  there are private  bidders
for STS-5.  The US  government will retain a  few, to fulfill its  own
needs, just as they own buildings to fulfill their own needs.
	5) I  would  not  be  opposed to  a  tax  checkoff  for  space
research.  I think with such a  checkoff it would fare better than  it
now does.  I  have previously  proposed (elsewhere) that  a person  be
able to  designate what  their  taxes are  used  for (although  in  my
original proposal the TOTAL would be fixed - each year there would  be
a referendum to choose among keeping taxes the same, raising them  n%,
or lowering them n%, where  n is set by  congress each year (large  at
the start or end of a war, small when things weren't changing rapidly,
never less than some constant, probably 2).

					RMK

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