In article om,
Eric Chomko wrote:
With a mandate to NASA to "waste anything but time."
Not comparable to any program today, since space is no longer
important.

Says you.

Says anyone who's looked at the politics. Space was important, *then*,
because it had become a symbol of superpower capabilities in the Cold War,
not because it mattered in its own right. But the Cold War is gone, and
in any case, space's symbolic importance died rather earlier, when the
USSR lost the race to the Moon and largely abandoned using space
accomplishments as a propaganda tool.

There's no Cold War in progress or likely, and even if there was one,
no likely enemy is going to trumpet their space accomplishments as proof
of superiority to the US. Same reason for both: everyone sees what
happened to the last guys who tried that.

Today's NASA mostly runs a jobs program, not a space program.

Just think what we could do if we didn't spend a $100 billion a year on
the war?

That money wasn't taken away from spaceflight, and if the US stopped
spending it on the war, it wouldn't be spent on spaceflight instead.
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