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Private R&D flops all the time, and is a good thing.

But it isn't a direct expense to the taxpayers when it does.

Government R&D does too, all the time, and is still a good thing in the long run.

No way is this good. For one thing the same ijits who screwed up the Hubble telescope (supposed to cost $200 million but actually cost $1.8 billion) are still in NASA. (except for those who have retired with big fat taxpayer funded government pensions)

Failure is the cost of learning.

Gross oversimplification. If I don't have a clue and keep failing in private industry, then someone competent will eventually step up to the plate (provided the endeavor is worthwhile enough to attract investors). In the government sector all I need to say is we just didn't spend enough and that seems to excuse anything. No consequences to the people who failed, but plenty of consequences to the taxpayers (as always)

MAN, I gotta get busy around here, but:

"But it isn't a direct expense to the taxpayers when it does."

Ah, no, but it is folded into the costs of products and services, and passed onto the consumers.

"No way is this good. For one thing the same ijits who screwed up the Hubble telescope..."

Yes it cost us a lot to get Hubble on-target, but it's still working very well beyond its service life. And yes, some of the same folks are there, and their next project, the Webb telescope, will be much better than Hubble. (This would be called learning from mistakes. A typically mandatory feature of learning, BTW.)

Is there deadwood at NASA? Oh my, yes! Nothing is perfect. The blunders by that deadwood costs you very little, and is much cheaper than "successful" grants from the Nat'l Endowment for the Arts. Pick your battles, I always say.

"Gross oversimplification. If I don't have a clue and keep failing in private industry... In the government sector all I need to say is we just didn't spend enough and that seems to excuse anything. No consequences to the people who failed..."

What you're writing is commonly called a strawman. It does not square with reality.

"Keep failing" would imply the same exact mistakes keep occuring. Genrerally speaking, this is not true, though the Shuttle program comes very close to your model of NASA's failure history.

Here's what I mean:

1. Hubble is myopic. We b*tch-slap a few manangers and then go about fixing the technical problems, and make sure they don't occur again. We send a crew to put on the bifocals. New development plans take into account the previous embarrassing blunder, and we end up improving the overall system that performs above and beyond the call for much longer than anticipated.

2. Various probes have been sent to Mars with static data programming, with some success, and some considerable difficulty in fixing faults. Results are good, but could be better, when we don't crash them into the planet. Somebody says, "what killed us before? Lack of flexibility and bad use of unit conversion? Let's not do that again." Now we have two rovers that can be programmed in-flight and on-mission (demo'd by Spirit's little hiccup) and a landing protocol that is scrubbed to death to avoid embarassment. (Side note: in this scenario, if the mission teams were as apathetic as you suggest, why would they go to all the trouble to improve everything?)

Theres more, but let me "oversimplify" again: NASA science and engineering, for all it's inefficiency, is not a welfare system. The people who work there, on the whole, are very concerned with providing a quality result to their work. On a systemic scale, "off with their heads" only breeds timidity, as is the case in the corporate world.

Have a great day, I gotta go.

But it isn't a direct expense to the taxpayers when it does.

Not in taxes...but in the final product cost. Ever wonder why a bottle of pills from the pharmacy costs so much? R&D, brother...R&D. Your bottle of Viagra includes the cost of all failed research, too. Complaining about the cost of NASA, the Hubble, etc. is simply myopic, for we the people pay either in taxes or at the retail level.