Nasa

[SadisticNature]

My personal opinion (which I'm sure will not surprise you ) is that they could take virtually all of the foreign aid money and split it between space exploration and domestic disaster preparedness. I'm tired of having my country denigrated for trying to help others. (Sure, we've done some bad things: who hasn't? But we're still among the first to respond to a disaster, anywhere in the world. And people hate us for it.) So eliminating foreign aid wouldn't be any problem for me.

One way to avoid another Enron is to make sure there is plenty of competition. Space is pretty big. Each company grabbing an asteroid, or a small area of Mars, for example, shouldn't present any real problems. After all, even if you tried to claim it all, there's just too damned much of it for any one person, or corporation, to hold onto.
And yes, we all do behave rather well. As long as there's someone with a big stick smacking our butts when we step out of line.

As you are so fond of noting, MMI, America has tremendous resources. We shouldn't need to rely on others. Especially not with things of such obvious importance. Relying on unstable countries for the necessities is a disaster waiting to happen. It's far better to be self-contained for such things.

While I agree with most of your statements in this thread I think some of what you are saying here is just outright wrong. I'm not sure if its just your media portraying it this way and you don't have easy access to accurate information on this but the facts show whether home or abroad Americans (particularly at the government level) are very often slow to respond to disasters. New Orleans had offers of aid from Cuba and many other countries before the US made an official response. There are other examples where most of the G2X (whatever X is these days) had responded before the Americans.

I'd also object to the fact that people hate you for responding to disasters. American popularity does well in the disasters you respond to. What the internationalists seem to hate is unilateral declarations of war without UN approval. If you look at international popularity of the US it falls dramatically after both the declaration of the Iraq war. It also rises during the US election and with the Obama victory. One of the primary messages during that campaign was rebuilding America's international reputation from the damage done under the Bush administration.

International views of the US also improved as a result of cessation of water-boarding, a controversial topic which had near consensus opposition outside the US.

Something to think about: If international aid is causing the US's poor reputation, why is it that other countries that are even more active with international aid don't have the same reputation problems?

Lastly, regarding space, in order to have company owned asteroids you have to have a claim law. Deciding just what that claim law is is going to be incredibly controversial. If the standard is landing, does the US now own the entire moon? Just the area near where they landed? Does the government itself own the land to issue as it pleases, is it instead owned by the government organization NASA (which could conceivably sell it to fund further space exploration)? The current claim law for space seems to be it is impossible to claim ownership of land on non-Earth planets.

There are all sorts of potential issues with companies being able to send out cheap explorations whose only purpose is to land on a whole bunch of asteroids then come back to Earth and by so doing that one company owns every asteroid they landed on.

Also if a corporation claims an asteroid what nation owns the asteroid, is the corporation now the government of that asteroid, does the country in which its incorporated own that asteroid, what property tax applies? Are there royalties on the minerals?

As for avoiding an Enron, the problem with Enron was not lack of competition, if anything the problem with Enron is they were uncompetitive (too much competition, too good competition?) and instead of failing and getting fired, they cooked the books to make it appear the company was fine.