The information gathered through space probes is awesome, but what's the point of knowing something if we are never going to experience it? It's like comparing writing a travel guide from second-hand knowledge with making the journey yourself.

You know NASA's budget is tiny compared to the military. I'd also like to point out the lofty goal of exploring other worlds has the power to unite mankind much better than a couple wars. In 1969, all over the world, people were paying attention to Neil's first steps on another world. For a brief moment, we were one mankind, united around the most extraordinary achievement of the 20th century.

"I'd also like to point out the lofty goal of exploring other worlds has the power to unite mankind much better than a couple wars. In 1969, all over the world, people were paying attention to Neil's first steps on another world. For a brief moment, we were one mankind, united around the most extraordinary achievement of the 20th century."

Boy do we ever agree here. Reminds me of the ending of Watchmen. A world united in the effort to save us all from randomly-appearing psychic squid. Gaaaaaaah!

Here's the rub though. I think that private enterprise has a greater chance of leading the charge here. Governments are hamstrung by their constituencies. There's nothing stopping entrepreneurs from reaching out across political boundaries, except for pesky laws in some cases, but that just serves to reinforce my point. The face that the laws like that even exist shows that the government seeks to prevent what some individual may be prone to try. In this context, reaching out in unity with "forbidden" foreign nationals.

Still, private enterprise does not exclude projects like those - quite the contrary - most of Apollo was built by private enterprises. It doesn't make them less extraordinary.

That's a testable statement. Though the more interesting statement would be: It creates more jobs than other things we could do with the many, and develops more beneficial technology.

(My guess is that those stronger version aren't true.)

I kid, but no really.

However, can anyone provide evidence that private funding can accomplish anything near the scale of what NASA accomplished? I'm asking that as an honest question.

I don't love government spending or bureaucracy, by any means. Who would, except perhaps government workers? However, I fail to see any major advancements that have happened without the scale of funding that only governments can provide.

I really want to believe that the private sector can do it. I just don't see a lot of historical evidence that it can.

I suspect that it's possible. Much of NASA's flouted benefit are the technological discoveries it has made while solving the problems of Space exploration. Assuming that those discoveries have benefited our society economically more than NASA has cost it (an argument I've read before) then it seems like their would have been at least one sufficient financial incentive for private industry to pursue space if given the chance. Not to mention R&D that can only be performed in a zero gravity environment. A patent system could make all this profitable.

But there are still so many other concerns, such as national defense that crop up in talk of private space exploration that it's really hard to make any real comparison.

But that could be because the place for rocket scientists before NASA was the Nazi party -- back when they were out to pretty much dominate humanity.

Did that answer your question?

That being said, Armstrong has a point: none of what I've just said is new or is satisfactory as an excuse. The failure to manage these facts and manage our access to space -- perhaps by a privatization push a decade earlier -- is an embarrassment.

I've seen that " you cant trust X to polititians" waaay too often. What's left around that one can supposedly trust them with ?

Or even better, is there something we don't trust politicians with that is faring particularily better? the corporate world doesnt seem to show any kind of outstanding performance, and is in fact just as pervaded with politics, with the execs playing the politicians' roles.

Any organization big enough to pull off the kind of stunt needed to push our exploration even further is inevitably big enough to be paralyzed by political strife. Small startups are pretty much out of the game because no one found a way of making space exploration profitable.

I can see how the situation is broken, but how can it be fixed?

Of course you can trust politicians for stuff, just like you can trust your corner grocer not to put poison in your potatoes. The problem, whether the private sector or the government sector, is where there are mixed incentives and no feedback loop. So, for instance, it's a big deal to come out with some vast new NASA goal every time a president gets elected -- but these goals always take decades to make happen, which is long after the current guy is gone. Presidents get mileage out of making the speech and formulating the policy, not making it happen. Likewise, unless you are a congressman from a district with lots of space spending, it's very easy to make speeches with phrases like "why should we go to the moon when we can't even fix our problems down here?" without anybody digging any deeper. So politicians do that. They act rationally.

There are no voters in space. There are no orphans to appear on TV with, and there are no space aliens to defend ourselves against. There's just not a lot up there to emotionally move the electorate, sadly.

In these cases, where the incentives are mixed and there's no reward, you can't trust them because of the role they play in the system as it is currently implemented. And no, I don't mean "can't trust them" as in somehow they are purposefully deceiving anybody or crooked or any of that. Most of them are really smart, dedicated people who want the best for their country. I'm very proud of the politicians and the people who work at NASA. But by acting the most logical way possible, exploration can't prosper. There are no bad guys and no hatred of government here. Space exploration just doesn't work the way it was set up. Sure, as a last great dream of an assassinated president, with a completely new agency, we could hold it together for a decade or so, but those days are long gone. What has been needed for the last 20 years or more is a bit more brave and pointed honesty at NASA. That's maybe too much to ask, but I think guys like Armstrong deserve it.

In 1994 we knew of zero planets outside the solar system. Ten years ago we had a handful. Now, thanks to the Kepler mission, we're on the verge of really understanding how common planetary systems are, how they form, the typical distribution of planet sizes and orbits, and how common Earth-like planets are likely to be throughout the universe. That's a big freaking deal.

It's a historical fact that the human side of space exploration has always been subject to great political influence. Consequently, it goes through these unseemly convulsions from time to time.

The political involvement in engineering processes drives rationalists nuts. Even to the extreme of believing that the way to rationalize human space exploration is to put it in the private sector.

Putting people into space is very expensive compared to putting unmanned instruments into Low and Medium Earth Orbit.

Our nation isn't doing well financially right now, and I see NASA's priorities as logical. They're getting a lot more knowledge per dollar spent right now.

All bad things happen when you trust politics to politicians.

Seriously - everyone (and that's not a US problem) should pay much more attention to what the people who is paid to represent them are doing in their name.

I thought, the last shuttle starts we're costing over 1 billion. So with 7 crew members, thats more than twice the price paid to the Russians. Sure, they could raise that price in theory. But the Russians can't afford to run the ISS on their own.

However, it's vastly more economically sound and safer to bring an aging device down in controlled descent and send up a brand new one with all the latest bells and whistles than it is to send up the Shuttle with a crew and do space walks for a repair and upgrade mission.

The shuttle weights 4.5 million pounds not including cargo. The Hubble telescope weighs 24,500 pounds. Most of the cost is getting things into orbit, and when building devices the cost of a second spare is insignificant compared to the cost of the first one. Obviously sending a 4.5 million pound shuttle as payload with crew into orbit costs considerably more and also destroys more of the ozone layer than sending a 24,500 lb payload.

We should have gotten our asses up and had something new by now, so we could retire the shuttle.

Is it just because the SpaceX flights are only cargo and not personnel? I can't tell from the SpaceX launch manifest(http://www.spacex.com/launch_manifest.php) what the launch is going to be carrying, but the Dragon is at least capable of carrying crew.

http://www.universetoday.com/89006/spacex-may-not-be-allowed...

Besides that, if we can manufacture spacecraft parts on the Moon, launching them is much easier than launching from Earth. You can even use a maglev rail to launch stuff from there - no reaction mass involved.

This should resonate really well with anyone building a startup. A startup is a money engine. You find something that is profitable, and you invest in it and grow it.

You can go out and spend a lot of money doing things the manual way, but if everything pretty much stops when you stop spending money, you're not really investing in a sustainable business.

This is the case with NASA and a lot of government programs. We were spending a lot of money, but we were not building a space industry... in fact, because government bureaucrats saw space as a competitive advantage (NASA, for instance, long enjoyed easy funding from Congress) they worked to stymie private interests that might show them up.

It is great that things are changing now. We have SpaceX building launch vehicles. Virgin Galactic will start their business any day now (hopefully, though remember how congress wanted to shut it down because it might not be "safe"?) Jeff Bezos is doing something off in the desert of west texas, and even John Carmack has a small space business.

But we cannot ignore the legacy of hundreds of billion sunk into NASA on unsustainable programs, and quirky launch vehicles designed to meet bureaucratic needs, such as to at least have one component of it built in each of the 50 states.

So, the news that NASA is in an "embarrassing" state to me, is good news. I say this, because I would very much like to see Humans have ready access to space.

For the military, that is a feature not a bug.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Launch#Concerns_and_investi...

Realize anyone with the ability to get to orbit has the ability to drop things on the USA.

Contrary to popular belief, the people in government who make laws and control regulation are not bumbling idiots. Sure, it's easy to make jokes about the DMV or the post office, but the reality is that the person at the counter you interact with doesn't make laws. The guys making laws are generally really sharp and well educated, and in fact a lot of them actually have economics degrees because it is a great background for that position. So they probably understand better than you or I roughly how many jobs are going to be killed by these tight regulations.

That is weighed against the military's desire to keep space less open for security reasons. For a long time the military was winning the argument. It has slowly started changing, but the delay certainly has nothing to do with a mis-understanding of economics.

Actually, in the case of the export restriction laws in question, they were bumbling idiots. These laws were passed in haste after there was an accidental disclosure of technology from the U.S. to the Chinese during an investigation of a launch failure. The law is terribly vague, with industry leaders unable to tell even what is covered by it or isn't. Additionally, enforcement responsibility moved from the Commerce Department to the Defense Department, with a concomitant increase in red tape that really only a large prime defense contractor could have the resources to cope with.

It would not be too much of a stretch to say that this law would be like outlawing airline travel completely on the basis of security concerns arising out of 9/11.

Finally, the arguments that will bring about a much needed change to these regulations will not be economic in nature, they will be arguments about national security. Already there is an international market for technologies untainted by U.S. control. Unfortunately for the U.S., the need for that market is going away as U.S. companies have been isolated for so long, and other nations have been so free to cooperate for so long, that non-U.S. space technology is, for the most part, superior to U.S. technology on cost, reliability, and performance bases. We, the U.S., are losing the larger security war by winning every local security battle with senseless and callous efficiency.

Maybe things have change a lot in the last three years, but:

"As Congress works on one of the most important pieces of economic legislation in a generation, a Washington research group has pointed out that more than 8 in 10 members of Congress don’t have a formal educational background in the business, economics, or finance fields."

"The research by the Center for Economic and Entrepreneurial Literacy, which aims to educate the general public about finance issues, showed that about 14% have degrees in economics-related fields and just 6.7% specifically have an economics degree. More than 30% of members have degrees in politics and government, while 18% majored in humanities. "

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2008/10/01/most-lawmakers-don...

But behind every congressman, every senator, and of course the President, is a group of experts. Every policy paper is written by a staffer. Nearly every political decision is made by a staffer. When they talk about a Congressman's staff, they are not talking about the intern getting coffee. Those guys are topical experts - usually based on what committee the guy sits on. Those guys are not dumb, and a lot more of them have econ degrees.

When I was figuring out what to do with my life it was become an engineer or become a staffer, I spoke to a couple guys in it. The typical road is go to Georgetown or George Washington University and get degrees in economics and political science or public policy, intern during college on a campaign or for a congressman, and then work your way up to a paid position. It's quite competitive.

And yet numerous bone-headed, ill-conceived, laws are written and passed.

While politicians may have smart technical people on their team it appears that, in the end, they choose what laws are written (and passed) based on political expediency, not, technical merit.

I have to wonder then if politicians are willfully ignoring their experts, or if they discount their experts because they themselves still can't grasp what they are being told. Or they pick experts who agree with their foregone conclusions.

At the end of the day this country would be better served with more politicians with proper economic and scientific educations. (That would eliminate a good number of so-called Tea Party candidates for one thing.)

I understand why it's done, but I still find it unfortunate and worthy of criticism.

To put this in perspective, with this cash, we could have also purchased one of the following:

- Two F-35s

- .07% of the TARP bank bailout

- Half of Groupon's Series D

I'd rather go to the moon.

The whole Juno mission to Jupiter is currently budgeted at a mere $371.1 million.

(Or for $500 million, we could give a loan guarantee to Solyndra and watch it go bankrupt!)

The bailouts were a necessary step to prevent severe economic crisis - they amounted to just 6% percent of GDP. Clearly worth it, when considering what is at stake here.

Compared to what America got out of the space race, the bailout was a complete waste. America got something like 100X their ROI in going into space. Major investments in materials science, aerospace engineering, battery technology, computer technology, their probably isn't a product today on the market that isn't using some kind of "space age technology" that ultimately came about because of NASA's space race.

So the space race was clearly worth it. The bank bailout is still clearly debatable. I would argue that because the banks turned around and paid out bonuses, that we should have placed the banks into receivership and re-structured them. In our post-bailout system, the banks have grown even more concentrated and reform is pretty much a failure. We're set up to be "way too big to fail" next time around.

When that happens, we won't be talking about "getting half our money back" and saying it was a "good deal".

Oh please. This isn't even close to being true. If you actually go down the list of things NASA fans claim to be commercial space development, what you find is a whole lot of half truths and exaggerations. The space race was expensive, and we never even came close to recouping what we spent. You can try to justify it on scientific grounds, but the space race was clearly not worth it from an economic perspective.

http://www.housingwire.com/2011/03/30/cbo-drops-estimate-of-...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-21/wall-street-aristoc...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program

Military strategists saw space as a competitive advantage. Although I agree with you about the problems with NASA and the need for more private participation, overlooking the military heritage of the space program undermines your whole analysis.