Quote:The Delta 4 and Atlas 5 were not developed using NASA designs, nor were they designed for use by NASA. There is a large market for non-government satellites in telecommunications. Interestingly enough, the Atlas 5 uses a Russian engine, so it's a stretch to give NASA any credit.


 

The Delta 4, which uses a US hydrogen-fueled engine could be called a successor to NASA technology. It has been discontinued because it is a distant 2nd to the Atlas 5 in both cost and success rate.


 

And if really want to say that modern rockets all use a liquid-fueled combustion chamber, then the rocket design credit goes back to Nazi Germany. Both Space X and Blue Origin are developing rockets that land vertically after use, something NASA has never done.


 

In any case my point was not that NASA has always been a failure. Competition with the Soviet Union made NASA very successful in it's early years. That competition ended by the mid-1980s, and NASA has done nothing noteworthy since the Shuttle in 1982, except for some scientific spacecraft that amount to less than 5% of the NASA budget and that benefit greatly from private sector advances in electronics.

Still nothing you said contradicts my point: SpaceX, Blue Origin and any other private company getting into the space business right now would not exist if it had not been for the research, development and progress made by NASA (and the Russians) in the past 50 years or so. Whether it was developing Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, the Shuttle or putting rovers on Mars, NASA has been plenty busy doing stuff successfully for the past while.

 

And to swing it back on the original point; you need government programs to do the things the free market refuses to do or can not be trusted to provide equally for all. In this case, the free market would never have funded space travel because it would never have been profitable, yet some or our biggest gains in science and engineering have come from space travel. The same with most scientific research; a large part of the scientific sector would not exist were it not for publicly funded programs.

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