In Houston, there are a lot of folks that work over at JSC or are involved with NASA stuff. There is the reminder of better days, and of great things that could

In Houston, there are a lot of folks that work over at JSC or are involved with NASA stuff. There is the reminder of better days, and of great things that could've been but never were. It's really depressing to talk to experienced engineers (even if they're not NASA proper, but lend/leased from Lockheed or someone else) who are like "Yeah, we could build that, no question, but who will pay for it?" It's even more depressing to talk to normal engineers at any meetup or hackathon, because there's the same sort of awe and mystique about NASA and what it could be doing, but also the tacit acknowledgement that the agency is fucked in the head--you usually end up with a bunch of Boomers old enough to remember when NASA actually did things that were cool. The most frustrating thing is that the technology works and has been in production for half a century now, but the agency is unable or unwilling to fund manned missions to completion--and these questions of "Should we even put people in space? Why not robots lol?" could be rendered moot if somebody just cut a goddamn check. The people know this. The engineers know this. The astronauts know this. And yet, no check. Worse still, you can't keep sending robots into space because nobody cares. Sure, a few people here or there who love ~=science=~ can appreciate the pursuit of knowledge for its own means, but for everyone else there needs to be a payoff. The only payoffs come, though, in either moving people off-planet to start colones or moving material back on-planet (which is fairly silly in its own way). If you don't do either of those things, then no shit everyone would rather your funding go to aging Boomers or poor urban youths or starving hillbillies or students loans or fighting the war on drugs or any number of more immediate short-term pains our democracy faces. At least we've got a few folks funding this privately--as for NASA, though, the best thing to do would be bow out of space all together and open-source and make public domain all of their research and patents.