I often wonder what could be achieved by privateers with just a fraction of NASA's annual funding. Just look at the incredible pace that X-Prize teams develop o

I often wonder what could be achieved by privateers with just a fraction of NASA's annual funding. Just look at the incredible pace that X-Prize teams develop on comparatively minuscule budgets! If you think about it, the situation mirrors that of startups. A small team of "hackers" can now build aeronautical technology better, faster, and cheaper than the big behemoth NASA can. And the reasons are also similar, in that it now costs less to build spacecraft than it used to. Incidentally, some of these space "startups" are run by hackers. Like Armadillo Aerospace, which was co-founded by id Software's John Carmack. I guess hacking on aeronautics is in the same spirit as hacking on software. I would really like to see what this article proposes: Focus on giving money to space "startups" and let NASA focus on the things that a slower moving, big company can do well, like research.