10 Federal Programs That Failed Miserably
6. NASA
One can not ignore the past glories of the nation’s space program. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration was created by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1958 and has been integral in all of America’s exploration of space and advancement in aeronautics since then. It’s hard to consider the agency a “failure” when we remain the only nation to ever send men to the moon and bring them back alive and in one piece, but who’s to say the free market could not have done so? Recent achievements by private enterprises have shown rocketry is not, necessarily, a realm that requires governmental involvement to succeed. Given a fiscal 2015 budget of $18 billion, it’s nice to park probes the size of SUV’s on Mars but if the private sector had been given free reign in this arena since the 1950’s, private, affordable space travel might be an actual reality.
