NASA and Amtrak?
May. 10th, 2011 10:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scott_sanfordOver 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.
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.
