That's the title of today's Dust-Up at the LA Times, between me and Homer Hickam, as we continue our Sputnik week debate.

[Late evening update]

Tomorrow's Dust-Up, on whether NASA has been helping or hindering private enterprise in space, is up today. Transterrestrial, your personal time machine!

"Forget Mars, _Mojave_ needs women!"

It seems to me that Homer is a bit of an ole' softy and romantic when it comes to NASA and space. He doesn't have much in the way of tangible ideas to some of the grander schemes he mentioned. Perhaps he is just making as efficient use of his writing space to piece his opinions together. Rand's paragraphs are like shotgun blasts of talking points all crammed together. Although, if I had been a read of this site for so long then I might have gotten lost on a few things mentioned on Rand's side. Two very different writing styles that is for sure.

"Forget Mars, _Mojave_ needs women!"

In order to adrress dis problem the bored is meating to discuss offering you a discount s3x changs.

It seems that the two of you are in broad agreement on what the agency should be doing. Not on whether it can or should.

Josh: So it's basically two pundits talking past each other? quelle surprise.

I will say, as a long-time reader of this site, that I pretty much can predict Rand's position before I even read the column. NASA's an outmoded outdated pointless waste of taxpayer dollars, they couldn't pour piss out of a boot with directions printed on the heel, private development is the only possible solution, hoo-haw doot-dee-doo.

"NASA's an outmoded outdated pointless waste of taxpayer dollars"

Not really. Current NASA human saceflight program is, however. And unfortunately it consumes lions share of resources that it has, rendering the rest of the agency relatively irrelevant.

No matter how you spin it, spending billions after billions after billions for several decades, to get a really marginal number of government employees to space with no clear purpose whatsoever, is just not responsible behaviour.

Screw the money spent, US is a rich country ( still ). However, wasting engineering talent and losing and actively obstructing opportunities for real development is just inexcuseable.