Orestes Munn wrote:Hooray for the National Labs!
Certain national labs are key facilities for advancing the sciences. They contain facilities and equipment that does not meet the business case that a publicly held company requires in order to invest. Unfortunately, budget pressures have turned many into subsidized competition for industry rather than institutions focused on advancing the science.
About 20 years ago, we used ORNL, MIT, and a couple of other organizations to find the root cause or a turbine blade failure in flight on one of 3 flyable F/A-18 E variants in existence at the time. Turned out the design was solid but GE made a couple of process changes in transitioning from development to production and introduced a stress riser.
Our flight test program was costing $6M/day at the time and the meter ran whether we were flying or not. Tapping into some of the best in the world as far as material science goes got us flying again is a couple of weeks rather than months, saving taxpayers more than $100M in program costs. The budget folks don't give credence to those events but we certainly appreciated them.