[Diplomat]

The internet and the computer you access it with are all products of the space program.

No they are not. Why don't we pour half of Nasa's money into resurrecting Xerox's R&D department and see what happens. I owe them a heck of a lot more than Nasa at this point. Nasa is a ridiculously large bloated agency that doesn't have to produce anything or sell anything to keep a float because we keep writting them larger and larger checks year after year.

Gut this pig and spread the money across other scientific endeavors.

And with regard to the posters stating all the wonderful inventions we owe to Nasa. My response is "what have you done for me lately Nasa?" We are going back 3 or more decades and pretending that Nasa is cranking out all kinds of useful new inventions and technology. They are not.

We will get much better economies of scale with our scientific investments by allowing any company other than Nasa to bid and when these individual projects.

[pepperdog]

"We will get much better economies of scale with our scientific investments by allowing any company other than NASA to bid and when these individual projects."

What on earth does this mean? Are you saying NASA is bidding on projects???

[ASH71]

http://technology.nasa.gov/Hybrid_Listing.cfm?x=0.439241777566

Current Nasa Tech in the Marketplace.

Oh and Pc's are small and powerful because of the initial push by Nasa. The Tech companies took it from there.

http://www.thespaceplace.com/nasa/spinoffs.html

[chimera]

NASA doesn't "bid" on anything. It is a government agency, given it's marching orders by the politicians in Washington, and bureaucrats who carry out those orders. Much of the real, elbow-grease, make-the-dirt-fly work is done by contractors. These are private firms (there's that word that is so sacred here on FR) who bid on contracts let by NASA. NASA itself "bids" on nothing. It does what it is told by the political world.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

No they are not.

Yes they are.

Of course the original reason we went into space is still the best reason, and that's the military one.

When the Chinese are free to lob missiles at us from their moon base, people like you who helped enable it will wonder how that happened.

Any technology fallout is just gravy.