[Shryke]

I hate to say it, but NASA is the NEA for tech geeks (and I am one.)

Wow, welcome to the Wide World of Ridiculous Analogies.

Hey. Want to moan about "pork"? NASA's budget is a drop in the bucket (with very promising long-term benefits) compared to the overall budget. Listening to Libertarians and others jump on NASA is like someone complaining of heat rash during a nuclear strike. You guys should be trying to cut the BIG ticket items first, no?

[Frank_Discussion]

Remember: Predators always take down the smaller and weaker of the herd.

[Atlas Sneezed]

Hey. Want to moan about "pork"? NASA's budget is a drop in the bucket (with very promising long-term benefits) compared to the overall budget.

---

So, to paraphrase Churchill, we have established that you are a pork-prostitute. We are now haggling about the price.

As a conservative, I prefer principle over pork. Just because a big-government project has a flag on the side, and is operated by former military men, does not make it "conservative."

[ArrogantBustard]

The problem is not so much that the NASA budget is a grotesque burden on the taxpayer, but that the porkbarreling, politics, and bureaucracy are bad for space exploration. NASA gets in its own way, and everybody else's as well. The problems were less bad during the "space race", but incipient even then. The evolutionary approach to space building on the USAF "X" plane program was completely abandoned in the interest of getting to the moon quickly. When the Apollo program ended, NASA's bureaucracy exploded, and NASA ceased to be productive.