Amidst huge entitlement programs, paying farmers not to grow food, pork and boondoggles, the nation’s transportation infrastructure has been badly neglected, and is quite brittle. It also makes one wonder how many other ticking time bombs there are out there.

This applies to space transportation as well. A category three hurricane could wipe out NASA’s manned space program. On some days, I’m not sure that would be a bad thing. It would force them to do something different, and break us out of the rut we’ve been in since Apollo.

Of course, there’s a big difference. The highway infrastructure was a huge improvement over the past, offering affordable mobility to hundreds of millions of Americans, with a great deal of redundancy and resiliency. The space transportation infrastructure has never been affordable to anyone but the government, or able to support more than a few dozen people in orbit per year, and it’s always been quite fragile, with no backups. Until we address this issue, we’ll never be a spacefaring nation, or accomplish the things there that many of use want. But all that NASA offers is more of the same.