As I tried with the other responses to criticisms of my original post, I'd like to steer away from blanket judgements about NASA. While I personally believe the

As I tried with the other responses to criticisms of my original post, I'd like to steer away from blanket judgements about NASA. While I personally believe there are a lot of systemic dead-ends, wasteful processes and general mismanagement going on and that this in combination with a widespread anti-science stance in politics is responsible for the failure of our space program (as defined against my completely arbitrary vision of what could have been achieved in this area) - I originally intended to make a statement about my much more personal experience that huge, complex (...) software projects are a recipe for failure: sure, you can still pull it off if you're Microsoft or IBM or SAP, but most of us are not. Edit: Also offtopic, but I feel compelled to answer this: [..] NASA tends to have a thousand little tidbits that end up getting reused over and over. I would go even further than that and assert that we shouldn't be aligning science and space exploration with the derivation of practical applications in mind at all. It should be done regardless. I'm not one of these "let's concentrate on terrestrial problems first" Earth-isolationists. Quite the opposite: my criticism of NASA is that there has been too little actual science and exploration.