OBAMA’S SPACE POLICY HAS BEEN GOOD, but Jerry Pournelle would go much farther. “Mission for NASA: Become the national Space Prize organization. Congress appropriates $2 billion a year, relatively trivial amounts; NASA sets up prize committees, stores up the money, and gives it away as prizes. It doesn’t fund anything, it doesn’t need large staffs, it needs some bright people to come up with prize objectives and definitions, judges to determine that the prize objectives have been met, and someone to sign the checks for winners. Nothing else.”

UPDATE: Related: Rand Simberg: Shuttlyndra And Bipartisan Crony Capitalism.