The Soviets won the space race. They installed a communist bureaucracy over the most critical of all areas to US culture:
Frontiers. Very few of us<http://web.archive.org/web/20090901150614/http://www.geocities.com/jim_bowery/NssEthicsAward.html>were fighting against this communist system of launch services<http://web.archive.org/web/20090901150614/http://www.geocities.com/jim_bowery/testimny.htm>back in the 1980s and those of us who did were roundly reviled by "space enthusiasts". When we did have successes, such as PL101-611, the Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990, individuals who had previously opposed us, such as Glenn Reynolds <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Reynolds>, were put in place by the powers that be to take credit. (It was comical to see Reynolds' look on his face when he sat next to me during Congressional testimony and the sponsor of the legislation, Ron Packard of CA introduced me as the main force behind the bill.) The history<http://www.oocities.com/jim_bowery/BussardsLetter.html>of prize awards<http://web.archive.org/web/20090901150614/http://www.geocities.com/jim_bowery/bafar.html>for technology <http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,39865,00.html> is a less pathological but similar pattern. It is clear that Easterbrook, with whom I had some dealings during this time, simply did not have the capacity to critique any government program as encroaching on an area that clearly needed to be left in private hands. The idea that rocket engineering was simply too sophisticated for private enterprise is utter garbage. Once created, NASA (which was barred from competing with the private sector only in communications satellites) had an incentive to take credit for all advances in technologies that might expand the space frontier -- hence was threatened by anyone not under its management at the very least as a private contractor. It is incredible to watch the folks here in Vortex speak about obscenity like NASA in any other terms. It was born of a Manhattan Project-style centralized government program an and, like the Manhattan Project, spawned a technology-suppressing bureaucracy that would not die. It was not a Gregg Easterbrook-like character, but Stanley Pons and his financial independence (along with Fleischmann's retirement independence) that allowed for an escape route for cold fusion. Yet, we see 2 decades later, the monster spawned of Manhattan, is still fighting for the destruction of the world.
