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589 points atomic128 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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pinewurst ◴[] No.41841253[source]
It’s not real funding, it’s a power purchase agreement from something that may never be built! No different from Microsoft’s previous fusion power purchase agreement. The Goog may as well announce they’ve reserved office space in a building to be built on Proxima Centauri B.

Just tech virtue signalling: Google/Microsoft trade the impression that they’re relevant leaders for some legitimacy for a blue sky startup.

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joshmarinacci ◴[] No.41841357[source]
A power purchase agreement is critical to getting investment. The US aviation industry is wouldn’t exist if not for the UK and French governments making a purchase agreement for planes at the start of WW2
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psunavy03 ◴[] No.41841601[source]
Uhh . . . source on that claim?
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throwup238 ◴[] No.41841838[source]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Purchasing_Commissio...
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samatman ◴[] No.41841998{3}[source]
This is a very far cry from the claim, which is that the American aviation industry would not exist were it not for some orders by Britain and France.

That one is hard to support, given that the American aviation industry was the first such industry, anywhere, and was doing quite well for itself prior to the outbreak of the war.

Did the orders help? Um. Yes? I mean they stopped paying for the planes after Lend-Lease so, mixed bag there, there was a war on and all. But I don't see how the gulf between "Without Britain and France paying for a few planes before the war started" and "$50 Billion in materiel provided free of charge with most of the debt written off and most of the production destroyed in combat" gets bridged. I'm calling shenanigans.

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dublin ◴[] No.41843581{4}[source]
It's worth noting that only several years earlier, the US aircraft industry was almost completely killed by the Wright's patents and licensing practices.

The UK, France (especially), Italy, and others were way ahead of the US until the Feds made the Wrights share their patents to support production of arms for WW I. This led to the rise of far more innovative competitors in aircraft design and production: Curtiss, Martin, Lockheed, Boeing, etc., which rapidly eclipsed the Wright company's fossilized and already obsolete technology. (Note that Wright was soon more or less forced to merge with Curtiss...)

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1. samatman ◴[] No.41848826{5}[source]
All true. But that's the Great War, not the World War.

Also worth noting that it had been eleven years between the Wright brothers' first flight, and the outbreak of the Great War. By the time WWII was on the horizon, US aviation was a force to be reckoned with. By the end of WWII, it was about the size of all European aviation industry combined, but certainly not before.

To address the sibling comment as well, yes that's accurate as I understand history. The big benefit of the prewar orders was that it gave the US a head start on ramping up for war production, which was nonetheless a basket case for the first year or so after the US entered the war, just before 1942. Without that head start the entire timeline for winning the war would have been pushed back, I don't think it could have changed the outcome but the additional suffering would have been immense.