Every story has a Who, What, Where, When, How, and Why. Thirty
years ago the Americans put men on the moon and brought them back,
through the use of technological wizardry and a lot of math, and to
repeat the feat without recognizing that the "Why" is now gone would
be bad storytelling. The US sent men to the moon for one reason: to
get there before the Russians did, thus proving the superiority of
the american Capitalist system over the soviet Socialist political
system. The moment Armstrong and Aldrin came back to earth,
the "why" dissolved into nothingness. One of the 20th century's
great ironies is the delusion that a socialist method - NASA itself -
"proves" that capitalism is superior to socialism.

And today, the "why" has become "maintaining NASA funding". The
politicians and bureaucrats in charge of NASA for the last three
decades have scrupulously avoided answering "why" for any of the
manned space endeavours in that time.

Instead they give us bafflegab like "it's for science", posturing
that the advancements of science over the last 30 years are largely
due to the manned spaceflight activities of that time period. In
reality, the science data acquired by the american shuttle
astronauts has been a very poor return on investment either in
scientific papers published or products developed or enhanced.

The millions of man-hours invested in Apollo was a monumental
effort, akin to the example of the Pyramids. NASA has also tried
very hard to paint space operations of any kind since then as being
akin to the building of the Pyramids - as massive operations that
involve tens of thousands of people working together for many
years. Apollo may have been like that, a Wonder of the World, but
that was then. People have been noticing the stagnation of the
space program, and seeing entrepreneurs like Rutan, Bezos and Musk having some successes for miniscule amounts of funding compared to NASA; Scaled Composites entire development program is costing something like 26 million dollars, what NASA spends in 15 hours.

The advancements in computer technology lie in stark contrast to
progress in space, with home computers now equivalent to NASA's
entire computing capacity in 1969. Computing cost has plummeted,
but cost to orbit has stagnated. The discrepancy is impossible to
ignore.

Slowly, the "space is hard and expensive, and only governments can
do it" meme is dying out. However, it doesn't help that NASA's past
business practices regarding competitors makes Microsoft look like
corporate angels. Just ask the guys at Rotary Rocket.

So why the avoidance, the bafflegab, the posturing, the presentation
of space as too difficult and expensive for private interests? NASA
walks a fine line; they must keep the public interested in space
enough to keep the money rolling in, but not offer the possibility
that the average person, or their children, might _themselves_ go
into space. After all, that is what really interests people about
space, the desire to go there for themselves. That's what keeps
NASA funded.

However, if NASA was to actually get the average person into space,
then NASA's manned spaceflight program could no longer exist in its
present form. They fought hard, unsuccessfully, against allowing
Dennis Tito and Mark Shuttleworth onto the ISS; they were vociferous
about Lance Bass. These men are the thin edge of the wedge, and
NASA execs know it - if average guys who just happen to be wealthy
can go into space, then the public might get the idea that anybody
can do it, not just NASA-vetted übermenchen.

Consider what would happen if there was a vibrant commercial orbital
tourist launch market. NASA's structure would change radically.
Some Centers might be closed or moved; the affected Senators and
Congressmen would be none too pleased. Such a market would force a
reorganization that makes the current shuffling of the deck pale in
comparasin. NASA would even have its budget cut.

Here's hoping that XCOR, Spacex, Armadillo and the rest can bypass
the NASA monolith and establish that market sometime before NASA's
CEV comes on-line. That would bring about an abrupt stop to NASA's
so-far 30 year manned spaceflight death spiral.