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Comment by AndrewMoffat | Hacker News Reader

Right, but, given the amount of incredibly useful products and discoveries that have come out of NASA's "inefficient, non-modular, non-reusable, difficult-to-test" architectures (see: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/50-years-50-giant-...), I think such a broad statement about the way NASA works deserves a little more qualification than a witty one-word answer, don't you?

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A lot of the alleged NASA spinoffs are vastly overrated or incorrectly attributed to NASA. Overall the spinoff benefits do not justify the enormous cost of, especially, NASA manned spaceflight and thus aren't a good argument for its continued existence. Trying to justify hundreds of billions of dollars in expenses with hand-held vacuum cleaners and better golf balls is patently ridiculous.

The only good argument is the direct one: it's something we want to do and something we should do for its own reasons and merits. Personally I believe that to be the strongest argument and also a perfectly adequate argument.

There is no question that NASA did produce some incredible useful things and made very cool discoveries (otherwise I'd have added the lack of those to my list), but the fact remains that NASA due to the way it operates and approaches projects did a lot less than what it could have achieved and ultimately presided over the long and painful death of the US space program.

But my comment wasn't even meant to highlight NASA's historically documented failures. Instead it was meant to illustrate what kind of project properties are not appropriate for software projects. I was making a statment to the effect that it should be considered a big warning sign if projects are structured like the space shuttle program.

On a final offtopic note about commenting style: you're complaining about deserving more than a witty one-word answer, yet you have no problem with making comments that consist of a passive-aggressive one-word question, do you? Let's keep it friendly, even if we disagree.

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