NASA and Amtrak?

[scott_sanford]

Over on Rocketpunk Manifesto I ran into this comparison:

The downgrading of the Shuttle program thus turned out to be part of a larger political shift, which has affected American space activity ever since. NASA had, and retains, a sufficient base of public and interest-group support that, like Amtrak, it could never be eliminated outright, but it has been kept on a sort of starvation diet, the root cause of many of its failings. If you provide just enough funding to keep a program from dying outright, you keep it alive but ensure that it will be suboptimal.

True enough, and some Americans are fans of both. There doesn't seem to be any good way to get more funding into either, although if you chat up a supporter you can hear of many useful things that could be done if the budget weren't so painfully restricted.

I think our priorities are not those of most folks.

Comments

[seawasp]

They also both suffer from the common shortcoming that if you try to pitch their services to people who might be able to increase the budget, you actually can't make a case for the services to make money. Passenger rail in the USA wasn't deliberately killed off, it DIED, and it hasn't shown profits (without ... creative accounting) since the automobile got really established. Similarly, space travel and exploration are all well and good, but aside from satellites (GPS, weather, communications), there's as yet no business case to be made for supporting them.

And that's why both of them remain as they are; just enough support left from the public to make it too much of a pain to kill, not nearly enough benefits from it to convince any politician to spend much time boosting it.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

Actually, there's some argument to be made that it was, if not killed, at least injured with malice aforethought. I'll leave that to readers more into the history of rail than I.

I will note that many public works and semi-private operations don't make money in the usual way or at all. Examples such as highways, seaports, and most utility companies come to mind. (Maybe you can explain how airlines stay in business; I won't try today.) Having them around is very valuable to society as a whole; that a bus, airplane, train, or space shuttle isn't making money on its own is pretty much universal.

This has been beaten to death over on Rocketpunk Manifeso, of course!