(QDurham) wrote in message ...
We can go from Galileo all the way up to the Wright brothers and Lindbergh.. essentially no gov $.

True, Lindbergh and the Wright brothers got the ball rolling, but it
took government money to make more airplanes (in the case of the
Wrights). And the space mission is arguably a couple of orders of
magnitude more complex than these.

And sometimes we forget: it wasn't the government that invented the
Space Shuttle, Saturn rockets, etc: it was private industry. But it
took government money to do it.

Jim Thomas