What stopped the space race?

Why do some areas of technology succeed while other, seemingly superior technologies wither and die?
Tesla, Einstein, and Edison are gone, and no one has replaced them. Why aren't there any new great inventors?

The great sci-fi writers of the past had us colonizing the moon and maybe mars by now. They predicted that our resources would come from asteroid mines as early as 2000. They were wrong. And yet we could have been where they predicted, if not for the cancellation of research programs.

We are at technological impasse. We continue incremental development. The easiest example of this is the serial nature of certain video games. They churn out a new copy every year. It is technologically superior to its predecessors, it introduces new features, but it is not really new.

Another example delves into the computer market: Why do we use inefficient processors when far more efficient ones are under development? The x86 architecture is flawed, and there are many far superior RISC architectures available. Even the x86 vendors know this, and to demonstrate that, both major x86 vendors have been using what is known as micro-ops for many years now. Micro-ops are essentially a way of translating a RISC processor into an x86 processor.

What was the last really revolutionary development that we, as the human race, accomplished? Nuclear power? That was over half a century ago. Space flight? The first Apollo landing was 1969, nearly fourty years ago. Since then, what have we accomplished? The transistor was a start, then the microchip, and finally the microprocessor in the late 1970s. It could be argued that the internet is a major achievement, but the number of pitfalls it brought with it is almost enough to call it a blunder.

Within the scheme of medical technology, there have been many advancements, particularly in imaging systems. These have been largely incremental as well. X-rays, ultrasound and MRI are the three truly new technologies that we have managed in that time. There are many derivatives of these three technologies, but the principles that govern them are unchanged from the original. In a CT scan, x-ray radiation still passes through the body and is received for interpretation. In FMRI, energized atoms still snap back into line with a magnetic field and release a characteristic signal in the process of doing so (the base principle of MRI).

We have accomplished very little since the 1950's. Let's look at what we managed before 1950. The early 1900s saw the rise of electricity as a practical phenomenon, and the beginnings of radio communication. 1903 saw the wright brothers manage the (arguably) first human flight. Vacuum tubes started the electronic era in the early 1900s. The wars of the early part of the 20th century brought about advances in surgery, transportation, submarines, and vast numbers of new ways of killing each other, culminating in the creation of the atomic bomb, the first step towards atomic power.

Many of these advances were truly revolutionary and forever changed the outlook of the human race as a whole.

So what happened in the 50s that killed off our scientific approach? What stopped the amazing innovation that we had through the last half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th? It's a complex topic, and this is by no means representative, but I think it really boils down to two points: Money and Patents. So really just money.

You can tell when an inventor is working at something new. They'll come up with an idea, and THEN think it through. They'll often test the idea first and then work out the scientific explanation for it. In other words, offer experiments first, math later. This is practical intuition. The human mind has a massive potential for intuition, but we have been repressing this ability with the bastard child of the scientific method and capitalism. This works out to "1) Provide a business case for the idea to make money. 2) Prove mathematically that the idea will work. 3) Actually test the idea."

I doubt Tesla could have worked under those guidelines. He lived through the very beginnings of this regime and that is probably also why a large number of his inventions never made it out of of his lab.

The world operated on intuitive invention for many, many years. The simple reason is that the practical results were more important than the reason for them. The world has changed. With the stock market in control of most major corporations, trying out crazy ideas with no justification is a good way to get fired.

Back to the present. You can obtain a patent for an idea with no working model. You can then sit on the patent for 17 years from its issuance with no obligation to develop the subject of the patent. You can patent virtually any idea, and there is very little practical scrutiny of the idea. This can be proven by looking at the vast number of patent busting suits that the EFF has launched and won. How can we claim that this promotes innovation? If the patent holder at least had some kind of obligation to bring the invention to the market, there would be some hope of patents improving the quality of life for humanity. Patents also harm the possibility of producing derivative inventions. Because they are based on a patented idea, an inventor will likely end up paying royalties to the previous patent holder.

Patents are in place to provide financial protection to an inventor--there's that money again. An inventor who is not backed by a company likely cannot afford a patent. This means that, practically speaking, only companies can hold patents. So how would a modern-day Edison or Tesla get their ideas off the ground? They wouldn't. They'd be laughed out of a meeting because their idea was too far-fetched. Very rarely, an inventor will be hired or paid for their idea, at which point the company that buys it will own the patent, likely for a fraction of what it is worth.

The early days of the Web saw a brief change in this mentality. A good idea could sell for millions of dollars. In many cases, bad ideas sold for far more than they were worth, which is what ultimately caused the dot com bust.

Now we are in a post-dot com era and shareholders once again want proof that a concept will work before they are willing to finance its development. This is definitely the safer path, but we have lost something along the way. Call it our technological innocence. There's plenty of evidence of that in the computer security world.

So what does all this have to do with men on the moon? Well, I imagine that no one managed to produce a business case to support the early stages of development of a moon base, so they scrapped the program. And that led the move away from development for the sake of development. There are arguments for and against development for development's sake, but I'll give an example of where it will make a difference in many peoples' lives.

Since the American civil war, the technology behind prosthetic arms has stayed the same because there was no money in development of new ones. Some people came up with new prosthetics, but after several weeks of use, most amputees would stop using them due to the discomfort they caused. Well, now DARPA has funded development of a new generation of prosthetic arm. It's not quite a neural linkage, (I think that would have been better, but DARPA specifically said non-invasive) but it's close. The new bionic arms interface with a normal movement through nerves spliced into the pectoral muscle. Sensors on the muscle tell the arm how to act, and vibrating motors on the muscle provide feedback to the user. If it weren't for the DARPA funding, this project would have never made it off the ground, and yet we could have had it years ago if only someone had been willing to commit the money.