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Snips: When Congress and NASA targeted $10 billion to fund competing launch systems, we threw in the towel. We simply could not compete with such government funded boondoggles.
Asking NASA to develop low cost space access is analogous to asking Amtrak to develop new low cost locomotives, or the U.S. postal service to develop new low cost electronic mail systems. Let's all be thankful that Congress didn't fund NASA to develop low cost personal computers to compete with Dell and Compaq, and new low cost operating software to compete with Microsoft. With enough money, NASA will always succeed. The consequences of NASA's success would be that Microsoft and Windows would not exist and some clunky NASA software package written by IBM would be the industry standard.
Incidentally, I was appalled that former NASA engineer Dennis Tito had to pay a foreign country to access the ISS. Let's all be thankful that Congress never funded NASA to develop the automobile. If it had, I suspect that the use of these dangerous vehicles would be restricted to "autonauts" and we common citizens would revel that these highly trained "autonauts" could operate these incredible high performance automobile machines.