Bush's space plan

--- Ed Minchau wrote:
> Furthermore, for tourism to succeed, it must make a
> profit and be
> done privately; NASA is ill-suited to the task (and
> it is well
> beyond NASA's mandate).
>
First off, I have often argued on here and elsewhere
that I think space tourism is really only a small
piece of the pie. The real money is in space industry
and mining.

That being said I think you are really misrepresenting
NASA. It IS in NASA's mandate that they explore new
technologies that later can be given over the
commercial industries for profit. In fact, NASA has a
department of space commercialization that is very
active in helping many space companies that actually
produce hardware. They also help many small business
hrough the STTR and SBIR (see
http://sbir.gsfc.nasa.gov/SBIR/SBIR.html)

For the record, I am, nor have I ever been, an
employee of NASA. Though my company has won many
awards from them. Generally these awards are for
developing new technology. A good case is the
development of Ka-band frequency. In the early 90s
NASA paid for the first commsat to utilize this
frequency. Before this was done, everyone thought
that rain would cause this signal to fade to much to
ever be commercial viable. NASA proved them wrong.

Fast forward to today and almost every commsat user
out there is now putting Ka-band payloads on their
spacecraft (every order my company recieved last year
has a ka-band segment).

So can NASA help for profit companies? Of course it
can and it does. It is in the interest of a
government agency, like NASA, to spur our economy and
help it create new exports which iin turn will create
a greater GDP. (on the negative side it is the role
of agencies like the dept of state to limit our
exports through ITARS).

Bottom line, don't think that NASA is forcing us down
in any way. Without alot of their funding, our
technical expertise would not nearly be at the level
in which it is today.

All I can say is that everytime I see a picture from
Chandra or Hubble, or see the images of Mars from a
rover, I am very happy that an org like NASA is
around.

Ryan Z