I'm doing a poor job of making this convincing but the loss of basic aerospace technology is happening right now. The American aerospace industry will not spend a penny to preserve basic aerospace technology for future use. They'll invest money on a technology only as long as they have a paying customer. The moment that customer disappears, the aerospace companies layoff the specialized engineers and toss the documentation into the dumpster.

In the past, NASA and the Department of Energy have acted as knowledge reservoirs of science and technology. The nuclear weapons labs at Los Alamos and Livermore have a significant number of employees who investigate controlled nuclear fusion and astrophysics. The national labs don't really care about either topic. However they are tasked to maintain a minimum level of expertise in nuclear fusion so they can return to designing new nuclear weapons when the government requests it. The maintenance of this basic skill comes under the heading of "stockpile stewardship".

NASA has performed a similar function with atmospheric entry vehicles, satellites and launch systems. This technology is all dual use. The exploration of Mars, Venus and the outer planets has maintained a reservoir of technical knowledge that could be handed back to the military industrial complex for weapons development. Unfortunately, NASA is currently dismantling that capability. NASA Langley, Ames and Glenn were the NASA centers where this basic knowledge was preserved. Those centers are currently undergoing major cut backs (it's happening all around me at NASA Ames). Right now, today, the people with the unique expertise are permanently leaving the industry with their specialized knowledge. This basic technological skill cost tens of billions of dollars to create and will cost billions of dollars to regenerate when the government eventually realizes it still needed it. If the world economy gets too deep in the poop due to resource depletion then the money may not be available to regenerate the forgotten technology.

Gary