“Truth be told I fly very little. I build a ton of things, mostly for the challenge. As an technical type I fell in love with the ability to not just learn how to do something, but actually apply the knowledge in a practical, clearly demonstrable way. You’re not just learning how to solder, and connect wires and cameras etc. Your learning the difference between 5v and 3v, how to estimate thrust to weight ratio’s and what cg is. Your building a thing that fricken flies! It’s tangible. like a thing you built with your hands and learned through, and solved problems on. A thing that taught you lessons, and what do and what not to do. In a day and age where we’re always hearing about the trope of “the guy that started X in the garage” it would be a hypocrisy for us to keep believing in that. That idea that great ideas can come from anywhere, but then limit a playing field to only big business with big dollars. I’m also concerned about the long term STEM effects. There absolutely needs to be some kind of clear process or provisions for those programs. If a nation wan’ts to be beholden to foreign interests the surest way to achieve that is to discourage it’s future engineers and scientists. Also, flying is just freaking cool ? ~ Ara Winters”