You have the right to call others here uneducated? Fewer than 1% of the nation's population is a licensed doctor or attorney, and yet you just called one that adjective, even as you have yet to demonstrate what your accomplishments are.

You have shown yourself to be uneducated on the subject you preach on- I would not hire a doctor to defend me in court, you would not hire me, a physicist, to remove your tonsils, why would we take space policy advice from a lawyer?

Dont get me wrong- I am all for sending lawyers to space- preferably without life support or space suits, but your statements to date suggest you have a tenuous grasp of the issues at best...

And before you start on your paranoid rant that I somehow profit from "government pork contracts" forget it- I dont.... and before you claim again that I fear competitive bidding on space projects, forget it- not ONE statement I have made supports those claims... I would love nothing more than to see space beyond LEO become a hot commodity competed for by entrepenuers, because when that day comes we will truely be a spacefareing species...

Government's role is to open up the door and then get the hell out of the way! Just like it has in the past- government paid for the exploration and mapping of america... After that private interests and pioneers took over and 200 years later here we are...

Government created the internet... and today due to free market exploitation of the resource we have the web as it is today...

after WW2 the government established the taxpayer funded national labs- the discoveries from those labs are more numerous than the rest of the world put together, and allow the US to be the undisputed leader in technology...

You see, my problem with you wasnt with the idea of competition and capitalism in space, it was that 1) You were misusing the board, and 2) you were all outrage, and little education on the subject, 3) you slandered any government funded research.... that is just stupid, government funded science is the main reason we are the world leader in science and technology...

Private companies would never fund a particle accelerator, or a space telescope like hubble, or any of a few tens of thousands of pure science projects that have no obvious payoff but are ultimately essential to our understanding of the universe- in developing the technology to make these projects work, we all benifit...

One example: The network backbone of the internet was largely a government creation... it was a guy at CERN (a costly particle accelerator) that first created the idea of a 'web-browser' so he could interface with other institutions more easily....

The benifits of the government funded space race are too numerous to detail...

The concept of adaptive optics was first developed by the government for military purposes-It hasbecome essential in our exploration of the universe, and now there are companies that specialize in it...

My point is in many ways government funded science is essential, and very often creates a whole new busines sector...

If you had actually participated here you would know we all want to see commercial utilization of space- we may differ on the approach, but thats it...