How NASA Screwed Up - An Essay
How NASA Screwed Up (And Four Ways to Fix It)
An intelligent essay on the waste of money and time the space agentcy, NASA, has become. Don’t get me wrong they’ve done some great and many of the dances they’ve done has gotten into the hands of Americans like… Tang.
Let private companies with a passion for space pick up the ball and give us all what we want and what we need.
To summarize:
Here is a set of rational priorities for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, in descending order of importance: (1) Conduct research, particularly environmental research, on Earth, the sun, and Venus, the most Earth-like planet.
…Yet NASA has no program to research ways of deflecting space objects, and the agency recently told Congress it could not spare $1 billion to catalog the locations and movements of potentially dangerous asteroids.
…Since the end of the Apollo glory days, NASA seems to have been driven by the desire to continue lucrative payments to the contractors behind manned spaceflight (mainly Boeing and Lockheed Martin) while maintaining staff levels in the congressional districts (mainly in Alabama, Florida, Ohio, and Texas) that are home to huge centers focused on manned missions.
…Given that NASA is sure to be around for a while, taxpayers should insist the space agency be recon figured to produce tangible benefits for all of us. With any luck, private space enterprise will eventually find success and begin to exert competitive market pressures on the government space program.
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