Definitely added this book to my to-read list.At the agency, they refer to some problems as “DARPA-hard.” What does that mean, and what kinds of things are DARPA-hard?
DARPA-hard means something that other government agencies and even private companies shun because it is viewed as being nearly impossible to pull off. DARPA-hard means taking on big risks for the chance of a big payoff. For example, scramjets have been theorized for decades. NASA got one flying for about 10 seconds back in 2004. DARPA-hard means getting a scramjet to stay lit for as long as the fuel supply holds out. Scramjets could turn out to be as transformative as the jet engine itself. Imagine being able to fly anywhere on Earth in four hours.
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Free-enterprise advocates would say we don’t really need something like DARPA. What’s the answer to that?
Free enterprise excels at advancing technology in incremental steps and at bringing that new tech to market. Government works best when it comes to pursuing far-out advances that may not pay off for years, if ever. A company trying to develop scramjets or Ling’s prosthetics would quickly go bust without some other very lucrative sources of funding. ARPANET went online in 1969. We didn’t get the World Wide Web until the mid-1990s. What company can wait that long for a profitable product?
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What’s the strangest research project DARPA is currently working on?
I only got a glimpse of perhaps half of what the agency is up to. But certainly one of the most out-there projects I learned about is a project to program actual, living insects into miniature unmanned aerial vehicles. Researchers are doing this by implanting insect larvae with microprocessors and sensors that become imbedded in the adult insects. The researchers can then remotely control the insects with a view toward operating them as mini-spy cams.
