Letters: Space, the private frontier

Re “Boeing, SpaceX win NASA fuel,” Business, Aug. 4

It’s a sad day when America awards space contracts to private companies. It’s an abdication of our preeminence in space exploration, and it hands vital national defense responsibilities over to the private sector. Our rockets and missiles are our best line of defense. I don’t want profiteers making decisions on designs and parts.

NASA may not have been the most efficient way to launch us into space, but it was totally dedicated to the job and was successful at doing the impossible: turning science fiction into reality within a lifetime.

John Thomas Ellis

Kentfield, Calif.

It puzzles me to see glaring inconsistencies in the arguments for more defense and aerospace spending so as to boost employment, while at the same time cutting federal jobs. Aren’t defense and aerospace jobs funded by the taxpayers just like the others, even if most of the work is done by contractors such as Boeing?

How much defense is justified relative to our security needs?

Nagavarapu Mohan

Torrance

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