Which brought me to the thought that: why is NASA not privatized? The US Navy doesn’t build its own ships and the Air Force doesn’t build its own planes. Would science be better served by high paid Boeing engineers with a financial reason to build space ships rather than the government? Wouldn’t it be better having engineers and people in the aeronautic/astronautic field manage NASA than congress. Do we really want poli-sci majors determining the funding of NASA?
Isn’t engineering primarily influenced by one factor: money? Our greatest scientific progress has come about in times of war; times when science and engineering are most profitable.
I understand that space travel is an imperial issue and that air power = power, but would we save money and further science by outsourcing NASA?
Ponder this and let me know.
2 comments:
While I too have a love of NASA and space and agree that privatizing it would be the way to go. Unfortunately, when something goes private or is publically traded, there is a crucial element that has to be present to make it work and that would be $$$$$$$.
Profits need to be made to help sustain it. Privatizing NASA is good in theory, but no one is going to pay billions and billions of dollars on scientists and research and have no profit from it.
You would need to find the worlds elite rich and have this be their charitable and humanitarian effort as they would reap no reward from it.
I am thinking weapons manufacture would be an interesting money making application. Killer cooties ala the more recently posted space germs article....
But that is all I got.
That and the fact that all engineers are black belts in nerd-fu.
Thanks for commenting, anonymous person. You rock-et.
HA!
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