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"...And pray that the American people pull the plug on NASA before it puts any more brave Americans at risk for their lives because of petty and meaningless concerns about the "environment."

SOUNDS VERY DRASTIC.

What about the Chinese Space program?
Can private enterprise compete against the Chinese?
Will the Chinese military use the gravity advantage militarily?
What if Hillery were to win in the next election, what would most likely happen to NASA?
What about the flood of technical work going overseas?
Will ending government subsidized technological programs be replaced with other programs that would foster scientic advances?
And if not, then where would the money go? back into our pockets? Or, into some leaky liberal program "for the children"?

It's an article I posted.

I agree with the premise that environmentalist issues are of lowest priority when life, limb or eyesight is at stake.

I don't suggest killing NASA, but stopping the stupidity that leads to the unnecessary death of people because someone wants to save a bee or a tree.

By identifying the “process” of thought that led to this fatal error; the inaccurate setting of priorities, we might be able to prevent this from happening again. Nothing will change if we don’t attack the real problem.

Red6

SOUNDS VERY DRASTIC.

Maybe. You should check out Burt Rutan, builder of SpaceShipOne, who says the future of spaceflight will depend on entrepreneurs and not governments.

I think he's right.

NASA is a money pit staffed by bureaucrats not innovators. It's time we stopped counting on them for innovation and progress in space, because we'll never get it.

Here's a starting point.

pull the plug on NASA ... SOUNDS VERY DRASTIC

You confuse pulling the plug on an incompetent old federal bureaucracy with pulling the plug on the space program. They are very different things, and NASA has all the hallmarks of an incompetent organization. However many competent and smart people work there, it has become unwieldy with offices and organizations checking the checkers. There is no accountability for making any decisions, no way that decisison get made in a traceable deliberate fashion, and no way to get anything done. You need to shed about 90% of the people who are there, but if you tried to do it, of course, being and incompetent organization, the people to do the reorganization would be incompetent, and the process would lead to the elimination of any pockets of competency left. The bureaucrats would see this as an improvement. Now they would be able to practice pure unadulterated bureaucracy, untroubled by the burden of any facts or arguments presented by anyone who actually knows what is going on or how to do anything useful.

If you think I paint a bleak picture, you have never been in an incompetent government organization.