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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mistwell" data-source="post: 171293" data-attributes="member: 2525">I would personally really like to see NASA completely cut and ended.Now before y'all go off half-cocked and flame me, hear me out.I am a huge supporter of missions to space.  I just don't think NASA is a good vehicle for those missions anymore.NASA subsidizes all space missions.  That means if a company wants to launch a satellite, NASA will fund part of the launch.  This makes it impossible for private space companies to compete against NASA for these jobs.Unfortunately, NASA is a bunch of screw-ups at this point.  The whole reason their funding keeps getting cut over and over again is because they are constantly screwing up missions.  And not little mistakes, or accidents.  I mean real screw-ups, like forgetting to convert between metric and american measurement systems, forgetting to convert between time-zones, and other really amateur mistakes that cost the U.S. taxpayers Billions of dollars. The government just isn't as good as private industry when it comes to doing things with intelligence.In addition NASA appears completely out of touch with what the american people want them to do with their tax money.  NASA has voted to spend it's only projected long-term budget right now on a mission to Pluto, rather than a mission to Europa.  Never mind the fact that there is good evidence that there might be life on Europa (no, not little green men, just some potential sea life), never mind the fact that all of the polls of the american people were to explore Eurpoa next, no, NASA is sending a probe on a decade long mission to a ball of ice that they know, with some confidence, really is just a big ball of ice.  Nice.  And let's not even talk about their anti-space-tourism policy.There are some very good American private space companies out there right now, who are fighting to get support primarily because NASA's subsidies block their attempts to compete in the Space industry.  Right now one of the only ones that seems able to make a go of it is XCOR (you can check them out at <a href="http://www.xcor.com/" target="_blank">http://www.xcor.com/</a> ).  And that company is having to run VERY lean and mean in order to make it (though I think they will).Life would be better all around for the prospects of ordinarly people making it to space if NASA were a thing of the past.</blockquote>

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