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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ColonelHardisson" data-source="post: 172863" data-attributes="member: 363">I'm not sure how you're disagreeing with me. If you had read my posts carefully, you'd see that my whole point was that NASA can't fly missions based on scientific merit. It has to answer to Congress more stringently than many agencies, including, and perhaps especially, the military. It has to act more like a government agency than a scientific braintrust because it is somehow perceived as less necessary. The gist of what I'm saying is that NASA should be funded, and should be a government agency, because its mission as an agency will ultimately bear directly upon national security, even more than it does now. Just as we wouldn't turn the military over to mercenaries, we shouldn't turn NASA over to the private sector.The military is a good counterargument to your assertion about privatizing NASA. The US military has to answer to Congress, and is tax funded. Yet it's the most powerful military on Earth. The point is that a government agency, properly funded, and given the ability to choose what it needs to fulfill its mission statement, can excel at what it does.Regarding whether the recent disasters NASA has had with its missions recently, particularly the Mars missions, had anything to do with funding - of course they did. I won't defend the stupidity of the metric/English conversion. But, an agency that is underfunded, understaffed, flies more missions than it can handle in order to maintain its funding, is subjected to misinformed public scrutiny, and is becoming increasingly marginalized by public myopia, cannot be expected to excel. Privatizing the space program will most likely result in even less esploration of space and fewer scientific missions - humanity's forays into space will be relegated to putting up communications satellites, and not much else. It's getting that way now, and it hasn't been privatized. What would prompt the private sector to go into space in a big way?</blockquote>

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