Posted by rbanffy 2 days ago
- Several products from the Lockheed Skunk Works, including the U-2 and SR-71 reconnaissance aircraft and the early stealth aircraft.
- Russian titanium submarines
- The original US spy satellites, the CORONA program.
- At the moment, China building aircraft carriers. They're built in shipyards that also build container ships, and it's hard to tell from the air which hulls are military.
One could suggest the development of the B2 Stealth bomber would be closer than NASA. The design of satellites used by NRO are much more secret than NASA.
It's interesting that everyone here is talking about mundane technologies or technologies that stem from a project that is almost 100 years old.
What happened to physics? We just found the one interesting thing and that was it?
Answering this question is necessarily an exercise in tautology. If there were any other extant Manhattan Projects, we would not citably known about it because, being a ‘Manhattan Project’, it would be replete with secrecy, including disinformation to keep the public from giving leaks about it any credibility. (case example, the Alamogordo Trinity test was called an ammunition explosion accident, by way of an Army Air Forces colonel, for the benefit of the good people of nearby Albuquerque).
Many today suspect the UAP study subject as being an ongoing decades-long Manhattan Project, from the late 1940s onward. As Congressional hearings leading to just this past Tuesday’s, Sep 9th have amply demonstrated, there increasingly appears to be some veracity to these claims. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LBKRr5OvF6E&t=1056
>Because the field was so new, using only recently-discovered natural phenomena that were poorly understood, a great deal of effort was needed to resolve this uncertainty along numerous technological axes. Thus the Manhattan Project involved a large amount of trial and error experimentation, and of pursuing multiple paths of technological development —
>It’s this last difficulty that is most relevant for other technological development projects. Developing other technologies doesn’t necessarily require building enormous, industrial scale industrial facilities to even begin, and doesn’t necessarily require rapidly proceeding before the proper information and supporting technologies are available. But it will almost certainly require investigating various promising paths of development, partially-informed groping around until the right combination of methods and components is discovered. Indeed, this sort of exploration is the very essence of technological development.
>resolving this uncertainty, and figuring out what a technology should actually be, is hard. The Manhattan Project had some of the most brilliant scientific minds in the world working on it, but even with this collective brainpower it was far from clear what the best route to the bomb was.
>Not all technologies will require expensive physical facilities to produce, or require extremely rapid, expensive development. But resolving the uncertainty inherent in a new technology — figuring out what, exactly, the arrangement of phenomena needs to be to achieve some goal, and how that arrangement can be achieved — is part of the fundamental nature of creating a new technology.
Never thought this kind of approach would be allowed to fade so far from what it once was. Almost nobody is even trying to carry the torch any more.