“same MIT that assured us in the 1980’s that it’d be impossible to create missile defense because, as the thinking went, “you can’t hit a bullet with another bullet”.”
Funny that MIT was so out of the loop. My brother was working on algorithms to do just that (with missiles) in the 70s.
In Huntsville, AL? Us Alabamians are kinda proud of the geeks there.
To be fair to MIT, at the time they said it was when their main U.S. Senator, Ted Kennedy, was doing anything he could to make then President Regan look bad. And Reagan was pushing SDI, which meant Kennedy had to oppose it. He did that by getting a lot of the deans and chairs within MIT to come testify to Congress and talk on Sunday shows and such and explain to us plebes how it can't be done.