Jeff Thornburg

But I will tell you why it's happened, in my opinion.

A lot of the engineering tools for spacecraft and launch vehicles were all written in Imperial units.

And so they've been very slow, the community at large, to change those tools to a metric standard.

Okay.

And so engineers get lazy because they want to stay in the units they're comfortable with.

I think, Chuck, there's still pockets of dumbassery going on.

Absolutely.

What comes to my mind, there's two things that I actually worry about now, which is

We're watching our scientists walk over to other countries now because there's no funding for them here.

But like, so you've got the scientists vacating and then you've got NASA engineers and folks that will not be doing the fundamental research.

We've been robbing R&D from the United States for,

My career has spanned 30 years at this point.

I can't talk to all the things that happened before me, but I can talk to all the things that happened in 30 years in my experience.

And it was bad when I started my career.

It's even worse now, 30 years later.

I think current events are going to have ramifications for America as a leader in science and technology for decades to come because of what's happening now.

Because you don't know which experiments are going to work.

You have to fund a lot of different science and technology areas, hoping that one out of 10 or 15 are going to be winners.

I don't know.

I guess that's why I'm here.