PerthNorg

The entire purpose of NASA is to keep everybody else out of space.

Not only is the International Space Station still unfinished and constantly breaking down but it cost over 20 times 'Space Industries' offer! American taxpayers should be sickened.

Whenever AT&T needed a telecomm satellite launched, several companies would offer to do the job at a reasonable $50 million. But NASA always stepped in and offered to do it for a mere $25 million. Even though it actually cost them 5 times that to do the job!

Many companies offered to launch private space shuttles for as little as fifty million dollars per flight. Yet NASA undercut them by charging only 38 million dollars per flight..... even though their actual per flight cost was over 150 million dollars! It's how they keep private industry out of space. The private sector couldn't possibly compete with a company that can afford to run shuttle flights at a four hundred percent loss and still stay in business.

Taxpayers are unwittingly subsidizing an agency that's 10 times less efficient than it's competition. NASA is working very hard to stifle competition in space. Crowding out private aerospace companies by pricing services below market value.

It's the Wal-Marting of Space. Wal-Mart ofcourse being notorious for moving into new territory, selling products below market value, and driving all competition out of business.

NASA is not a necessary government agency. But NASA would like the American public to believe that it is. The plethora of NASA movies coming out of Hollywood is simply a matter of economics. Following the wildly popular movie Top Gun - a Tom Cruise jet pilot blockbuster that played like a two-hour advertisement for the U.S. Navy - NASA realised the true potential of Hollywood as a public relations powerhouse. NASA quietly began offering film companies free filming access to all of NASA's dramatic facilities: launchpads, mission control, training facilities. Producers accustomed to paying enormous on-site licensing fees jumped at the opportunity to save millions in budget costs by making NASA thrillers on 'free' sets. Ofcourse, Hollywood only got access if NASA approved the script. Essentially its public brainwashing. But thats not nearly as bad as the publicity stunts. Like sending senior citizens and public school teachers into space.

Satellites that disintegrate in orbit, space probes that never call home, the International Space Station budget rising tenfold from 8 billion dollars to over 100 billion and member countries bailing out like rats from a sinking ship, space shuttles blowing up and killing their crews. The string of blunders and gargantuan budget overruns by NASA over the years makes one want to either laugh or cry.

So why is NASA so wasteful and incompetent? Simple. It's not their money. Governments don't give a rats behind about throwing good money after bad. The taxpayers can always be squeezed for more cash.

If Australia wants to be a serious player in world affairs then we must have our own space agency again. But not one administered by a bureaucratic government agency. Consider the computer industry, in which we see such an explosion of progress that we can barely keep up from week to week! Why? Because the computer industry is a free market system: it rewards efficiency and vision with profits. Imagine if the computer industry were government run? We would still be using the Abacus!

We should put Australian Space Exploration in the hands of the private sector where it belongs. The growth would be stunning. New jobs and new industries. Let the free market system spur us to new heights in space. The Space Frontier Foundation argues that the U.S. space employs unfair business practices to prevent private companies from launching missions into space. They're right. In fact NASA is an illegal monopoly.

Whether he can prove NASA isn't trying to keep humanity out of space is another matter entirely. Right now he is over at the Discovery Channel working with MythBusters on a program dedicated to the Lunar Conspiracy theory.

My money is on Robert Zubrin to win this debate. He is a genuine expert on NASA. Phil Plait is just an astronomer with his head in the clouds. Writing a book on whether the Apollo program reached the moon is like writing a book proving the world isn't flat. It's no real challenge.

I'm currently redirecting both these domains to the open discussion thread at the forum for this topic.

Is NASA holding back human progress? Should NASA be allowed to keep humanity out of space? Should the Australian Government rail against this immoral act by helping to sponsor its own private space companies?