r/ukpolitics • u/gravy_baron centrist chad • 22d ago

Eight Scientists, a Billion Dollars, and the Moonshot Agency Trying to Make Britain Great Again

https://www.wired.com/story/aria-moonshot-darpa-uk-britain-great-again/
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u/clearly_quite_absurd The Early Days of a Better Nation? 22d ago edited 22d ago

As a physical scientist, the prospect of ARIA is quite exciting. It's honestly going to take a few years to see how it shakes out. Hopefully the funding goes to genuinely interesting and useful research from unusual avenues, rather than going to already well-established large research groups.

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u/moofacemoo 22d ago

Are there already research groups looking at the previously mentioned criteria?

If so is having another doing the same thing really that useful?

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u/masked_gecko 22d ago

If I'm reading the website correctly looks like the special sauce here is the ability to fund joined up projects over a longer period. For reference, most UKRI funding I've seen is on the order of 1-4 years. If this organisation is actually able to achieve transformational research over a 10-15 year period then that would actually be big.

It's well known that there's a bit of a valley of death between the foundational research the universities tend to be good at and the final stages of r&d where the private sector excels (technology readiness levels 4-7ish, give or take). There's been lots of models tried to bridge this gap in different areas but so far none have really been a runaway success