To give them credit, NASA comes up with a hell of a lot of stuff like this, but it hardly ever makes the news. What people hear is cliches like "Tang" and Teflon pans.

As government programs go, NASA has not entirely been a hole in the ground for money. Granted, the Shuttle and Space Station eat billions, and maybe the same thing could have been accomplished for less, but how many lives and how much property have been saved by weather satellites? What portion of our economy is the product of the comsats that handle so much of our communications? I'm sure we can all think of examples. One wonders what things would have been like if NASA had been legally allowed to grab a "piece of the action" all these years.

One can generate a long debate on the subject of how space would have been developed, if at all, had the government not done it. It's not an easy question. Arguing it from either a pro-NASA or a pro-Libertarian standpoint, both scenarios run into some interesting impasses.

My call on it, the short version, is that in a no-NASA world, we would be a lot farther behind in pure exploration. Man may not have reached the Moon yet. Maybe no pictures of Jupiter, Saturn, or Mars. The good news would be that we would probably have a robust presence in LEO and GEO, probably including a number of manned and man-tended stations for commercial purposes. Launch vehicles would probably be reusable. If a good, commercial reason for going to the Moon showed up, we would go big time.

I like to think that if the launch costs and space technology were cheaper, private groups would be able to finance things like Mars Missions. Intel spent over $100 million on its last advertising campaign. This is not anywhere close to what a Viking mission cost, but it's not exactly chopped liver either.

In Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold The Moon," they went to the Moon in a modified mail rocket.