Message posted by loopbacktest4echo on October 16, 2008 at 8:15:08 PST:

To the best of my knowledge the Groom lake facility is a secure test range and development lab for diverse exotic projects for the intelligence community. The site is hosted by the USAF. The F-35's and the F-22's are developed and tested at other established AF centers. Most defense contractors and technical university research departments come up with next generation or several generation out ideas and concepts which are reviewed for funding. The proposals that are sound (merited) and fill a current need or a projected future need will be funded. As the projects pass through different stages of development they are often co-opted by different government or private (qualified) organizations. The projects flow to interested organizations where they get add on funding along with additional resources. Thus a MIT research project or doctoral thesis might get funded by the NRO and joined to a defense contractor finally ending up being tested at Groom. I worked for a government think tank and we had a warehouse full of projects that either lost funding or were put on hold pending other developments. Some projects become orphans waiting for angel funding. The warehouse was like out of a Sci Fi movie. Sort of like a top secret junk yard. Anyways the theoretical research is 20 to 30 years ahead or out in front of current technology. The brilliance is in short cutting a long development time with innovation or discovery. There's the leading edge, the bleeding edge, and then there's walking the plank. The research is in all areas from physics, mathematics, biological, chemical, you name it, etc. One thing I would keep in mind is that a very large amount of money funds research and development for future technologies. Now if you succeed in developing tomorrows technology today you have to be careful. If the world finds out about it then you no longer have a game changing advantage and this will quickly spur a technology race. So in order to protect the investment, keep the advantage, and prevent a costly development race, everything at Groom has to be kept as secret as possible as long as possible. If you are interested in this I would suggest looking the websites of major defense contractors and universities research departments development directives. Now realize they are talking in very generic terms and that the actual research most likely has much deeper implications. You have to extrapolate here. DARPA's research is another example. Another idea is to look at the histories of corporations like RAND. Lot of history there. I hope this is helpful in some way.

In Reply to: How far advanced is our technology? posted by Robert on October 15, 2008 at 14:42:55 PST:

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