Or even more fundamentally, "is there any profit for someone to keep?" It's not like the Apollo program was the space equivalent of a state owned rail system -

Or even more fundamentally, "is there any profit for someone to keep?" It's not like the Apollo program was the space equivalent of a state owned rail system -- capable of making money for the first private owner to take it over. It was always "in the red" if you measure such things in business terms. People twist themselves in knots trying (IMO) to assign dubious "spinoff" benefits, with dollar signs attached, to NASA work. Give up on trying to justify all scientific research in the vocabulary of business, I say. I support public funding for space probes, astronomy, high energy physics, and all sorts of other things that expand the frontiers of human knowledge without being likely to generate new commercial products or profits.