Space spending to be increased by £60m a year.

[Daz Type-R]

Great news - as long as it is spent wisely!

Even though - another win for science / technology from Britain, especially in this economic downturn!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20250533

[Perkil8r]

Although some folks would argue otherwise, I believe we need to invest more in science etc so we can build the foundations for an ecconomic re-birth. Britain used to be one of the world leaders in technology, we need to regain some of that so we can start and sell stuff again. I think this is a positive step towards that.

[Teslar]

+1 from me Mike. Well said

[Sheila]

problem is Mike when we do anything good, we let everybody else have it and then they

make the money out of it :-(

Sheila

[Craig]

I'm all for increased science spending so this is a big positive! I wasn't expcting this in the current climate at all.

[Perkil8r]

problem is Mike when we do anything good, we let everybody else have it and then they

make the money out of it :-(

Sheila

Amen to that. Unfortunately we are a victim of our own success. As we became more wealthy we decided we could pay others to do it cheaper, so we did. Now we are faced with the grim truth that a lot of our skilled workforce have now passed on without passing the knowledge and skills on down through the generations. We are now left with a country that has lost a lot of the skills needed to be able to manufacture on a mass scale. The problem is now, the Chineese etc are begining to catch up to where our mentality was in the late 70's. The "common" workers are begining to want more from their lives, wages are increasing and as a result prices are going up with them. We are getting to the point where if we had the infrastructure in place we could now be manufacturing on a comparable level with regards to qty and price. We don't have that now, so we are forced to increase our spending on importing the goods we once could have made. An example of this is the cost of bearings, over the past year they have more than doubled in price. The new competitor for bearings is now Russia so I am told. The quality is certainly there, and the price back to 2010 china prices.

Investing in science is now more important than ever for the UK IMO. If that be into space etc then so be it, there is certainly a lot of money to be made out of this frontier. Okay, maybe we can't make money out of making widgets, but maybe we can look to making money out of widgets in space or sending them there.

[T A WOW]

That is surprising in the current economic climate.