Re: Concorde: proof engineering and beauty are not exclusive.
"So we should conclude that Concorde was certainly big, noisy and clever, and it was also a job creation scheme for aerospace engineers."
It was also PR. White heat of technology and all that. Also cold war posturing. The USSR obviously got their hands on a lot of the plans but sill didn't manage to fly their TU-something commercially.
At the very least, there was a lot of blue sky engineering and data that could never have been collected any other way. Blue sky research is often uneconomic and often goes nowhere, but sometimes the most amazing things are discovered and you can't away put a price on that.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
