A lot of stuff is coming up about fusion reactors and cheap space vehicles, but these aren't really likely even given double funding, perhaps especially given double funding since there is limited reason to search out cheaper, more efficient avenues.
A lot? Let's see, six posters have mentioned fusion. Discounting Asnys, who was only listing it as a point for dicussion, only two of those have mentioned it in a positive light. Myself, Killer 300, and jmc247 have expressed skepticism about the plausibility of
any amount of funding leading to a breakthrough by the present day, although jmc247 thought that if funding were increased after 9/11 we might be closer to a breakthrough than we are. One of the posters mentioning fusion in a positive light seemed to think we were discussing possible
future breakthroughs.
Four posters mentioned space in the context of reduced launch costs (one other mentioned it in the context of spurring the US to invest in a technology). Again discounting Asnys, and again for the same reasons, only one of those, the same person who thought we were discussing possible future technologies, thought it was plausible. Killer300 believed that space would need a strong business case before reduced launch costs would be possible and I believed technical/political factors would prevent anyone from even conceptualizing most of the (currently appearing to be) viable routes to space launch before the 1980s at best.
This objection has no connection to what's actually been discussed in the thread. If anything, far more people have expressed skepticism to the idea that increased R&D funding would lead to any significant breakthroughs than have thought that it would lead to "Civilization-style" advances (and Civilization has diminishing returns, anyways...), which is probably an even more implausible viewpoint.
Also, there's only so much you can spend on the "big, expensive" approaches. If you have two or three tokamaks, a laser implosion facility, and a Z-pinch facility, and more money to spend...why
not spend it on some cheap high risk/high reward programs? Similarly, in particle physics there only so many "big rings" you can use, evidently (once you get big enough) no more than one or two in the
world. Why not spend it on cheaper alternative research programs?
To what end? Having data is great, but it means diddly-squat if you're not going to do anything with it.
Um, what? This is a bizarre objection to make, especially to a pure research program. And as to the use of the data, well, data returned from the planetary science program has led to a far better understanding of the nature of the planets, their geology and atmospheric dynamics, and the history of the solar system, which has significant implications for Earth sciences as well (since of course the Earth is a planet). It's to the point where you could say, not without reason, that there were two eras in solar exploration, Pre-Spaceflight, and Post-Spaceflight, and only in the latter was planetary science even really a
science that could actually describe the planets in any detail.
Although I'm not sure why you're hung up on planetary science, given that it was just an example I picked because it dramatically shows the effect I was describing and because I'm familiar with it. You could say the same about nuclear physics, with a breakpoint at the Manhattan Project instead of Sputnik, for instance.
BFC is more likely to occur with reducing budgets rather than increasing ones, since people want the same performance for less money.
Yes and no. Yes, because obviously with larger budgets there's more incentive to build Christmas-tree Flagships that make everyone happy with loads of data returned and a really high scientific value. No, because sometimes these things are caused by political and historical factors that have nothing to do with budgets. Eg., Better Faster Cheaper itself was caused by a combination of the utter failure of the flagship-first idea at NASA over the previous decade (which launched
three probes, Galileo, Magellan, and Mars Observer, the last of which failed), a wave of management reform enthusiasm in government in the 1990s, and the particular characteristics of Goldin. They probably spent
more on planetary exploration in the 1990s than the 1980s...they certainly launched more missions (Cassini, Mars Global Surveyor, four Discovery-class missions, Deep Space 1, Mars Climate Orbiter, and Mars Polar Lander/Deep Space 2), plus they did a lot of work leading into later probes (especially New Horizons and Europa Orbiter, but also a lot of development for the MER was undertaken during the 1990s).
Of course, Better, Faster, Cheaper was a terrible idea
anyways, as it turned out, so I'm not sure why this should be an
objection. There have been many ideas about how to reduce costs over the years, even during some of the better periods for NASA's budgets. Most of them failed because budget shortages meant that they couldn't be implemented (eg., the Planetary Observer/Mariner Mk. II idea from the 1980s. Congress wouldn't pay for the multiple probes needed for the economics of the idea to work out)
I'm sure, but throwing $3 million into a bad project instead on OTL $1 million does nothing really good.
Maybe, but if you throw $3 million, which is really a trivial sum, into three bad projects, especially three nice-looking bad projects...which is probably closer to the mark for most R&D projects. Only certain cases would more money be thrown into the
same projects.