I was notified of this one courtesy of Google News Alerts: Robert Garmong commenting on private space exploration:
It is impossible to integrate the contradictory. To whatever extent an engineer is forced to base his decisions, not on the realities of science but on the arbitrary, unpredictable and often impossible demands of a politicized system, he is stymied. Yet this politicizing is an unavoidable consequence of governmental control over scientific research and development....
We often hear that the most ambitious projects can only be undertaken by government, but in fact the opposite is true. The more ambitious a project is, the more it demands to be broken into achievable, profit-making steps — and freed from the unavoidable politicizing of government-controlled science. If space development is to be transformed from an expensive national bauble whose central purpose is to assert national pride to a practical industry, it will only be by unleashing the creative force of free and rational minds.
Without a doubt, NASA needs to go. As I've written before:
There's no telling what economic disruptions were caused by President Kennedy's huge, coercively-financed pet projects--the Vietnam war and the race to the moon--and there's no way of telling how those dislocations are still with us today. For those among other reasons, Kennedy is no hero.
Garmong salutes the people at the SpaceShipOne project, and so do I.