I see we have several believers in big government programs among us who have apparently never read Frederick Bastiat’s “That Which Is Seen, And That Which Is Not Seen.”
Sure, everyone many would say that any big government program provides “good” things. The Great Society provided housing to the poor, food to the hungry. Social Security takes care of the old. The space program gave us Tang and many useful devices.
The point is, however, that in order for the government to produce all of these “good” things, the government had to seize capital from the private sector. That is money that the private sector did not have to invest and that investment did not create what it would have.
We will never know what “good” services or devices we would have had had the private sector been allowed to keep the money that was spent by HUD or the EPA or NASA.
Who knows, we may have been much further along in space flight and all of the technology that goes with it if NASA had never existed.
Of course NASA wasn’t really created for the feel good, let’s go to the moon adventurism. Isn’t it strange how the same tech that would send a rocket to the moon would also send a ballistic missile to the Soviet Union?
Let us all be more aggressive about TRUSTING the operation of free markets supported only by an honest court system. There is a role for Federal Government in space, by the Constitution, but it doesn't include most of what NASA has done, or the obese Sun-blocking establishment it has become.