When the government buys airplane tickets, or Windows software, does that make the airliner or Microsoft no longer a private contractor?

Answer: If their primary source of R & D and their success depends on the government’s funding-YES! (I believe Microsoft would do just fine without government money).

The fact is, calling Ares unaffordable and unsustainable is based on political decisions to make it so. Is the $700+ billion stimulus package affordable or sustainable? The real issue is one of priority. If the government felt that manned space exploration was important to the American people, they would fund it at an acceptable rate (I’m not just picking on the Obama administration here-this has been a problem since the beginning of manned space). As I have always believed and will continue to believe, the NASA budget is relatively tiny and could be increased to an acceptable level without a huge tax burden on Americans. I hope commercial space succeeds, but we are not there yet. If the government really gives a rip about space, they need to do what will happen quickly and capture the hearts of our nation (government per se doesn’t do this well, but meaningful space exploration DOES). Let’s suck it up and give Ares a chance!

Proper funding for Ares from the beginning would have been zero funds. A program that is unaffordable and unsustainable is not going to be successful.

When the government buys airplane tickets, or Windows software, does that make the airliner or Microsoft no longer a private contractor?

Why does this person refer to itself in the third person? Who does it think it is, Bob Dole?

To be honest, this writer’s career doesn’t hinge on whether the space program survives or dies. The private sector has its own set of pressures only recently being discovered by contractors who depend on government programs for a life in this land. This writer personally has no dog in this hunt, but would prefer to see a viable, active manned spaceflight program thrive, preferably on the wings of a government funded and managed program supervised by a chartered agency, NASA, than in the hands of the private sector playing with tinker toys. This writer wants his tax dollars to go to a properly funded NASA to press on back to the moon and beyond. The pluses need not be relisted here. There are tangibles and intangiables. ‘Technical life insurance’ and so on. But as stated previously, if the manned space program, as all Americans have known it since May 5, 1961 – the program driven by national pride as much as by rocketeers and budgeteers– ends with the words, ‘wheels stopped,’ in the out years, as you noted, when budgets get tighter in an increasingly morose economy, the rationale to keep NASA intact will become hard to make, with no manned program to show for the funding. If it’s just to fund esoteric research projects, they can be folded into other existing agencies; the ISS can be de-orbited into the Pacific — or U.S. interests sold off to other nations — and NASA can be eliminated as a budgeted agency. It’s an easy argument to make — and one conservatives have especially been salivating to make for decades.

The responsibility for private space ventures taking off is not President Obama’s to guarantee, with financial incentives for private enterprised space ventures. If they cannot raise capital and accept the risk themselves in the private sector, too bad. NASA has been neglected and misdirected for 30 years — and infected with low and mid-level bureaucrats more concerned with protecting turf than pressing on out into the great unknown. A healthy 25% cut across the board in paper jockeying staffer would be a refreshing start. It’s chiefly an R&D outfit with some of the finest engineers on hand. Some may make good managers, as much as they naturally recoil from the title. Engineers are not the kind of people you want planning or running a venture whose goal is turning a profit, not cutting-edge exploration. But if NASA doesn’t have a new spacecraft in the pipeline by the time the last shuttle crew radios ‘wheels stopped,’ it’s mission in the eyes of the public will have ended. And that would signal 52 years of waste… not 30. Yes, it’s time to move on– back to the moon, up and away from going in circles in LOE.

Slander is:

“Defamation—also called calumny, vilification, slander (for transitory statements), and libel (for written, broadcast, or otherwise published words)—is the communication of a statement that makes a claim, expressly stated or implied to be factual, that may give an individual, business, product, group, government, or nation a negative image. It is usually, but not always,[1] a requirement that this claim be false and that the publication is communicated to someone other than the person defamed (the claimant).”

If anything it would have been libel, not slander because it was a written statement. But I didn’t make any claims directly at him. The sarcasm was directed at his statement and its value. I did not directly defame is person at all.