For the most part NASA seem like one of those organisations you're pretty happy to see your tax dollars being used on. They're making some amazing discoveries and doing it entirely in the simple, human pursuit of knowledge, following a spirit of adventure and exploration which sits at the very heart of the American identity and way of life. They actually are checking out a new frontier, and it's amazing what they find. Much rather the money gets spent on that than, say, building more tanks and weapons and nuclear missiles, which are used only for death and destruction, eh? Well, sadly, the two may have a closer link than you think. Or possibly not, when you consider that NASA spend a lot of their time designing ruddy great missiles - something the US military has some interest in. In fact, whilst NASA is technically a scientific organisation at this point (despite occasionally being looked upon to do some weapons stuff, which is a little outside of their purview), during the early days they were something of a rival to DARPA - that's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to you and us, the government agency that's all about building weapons. For a period of time they were the preeminent rocket-designers for both scientific and military purposes, their inventions delivering both astronauts and bombs across the cosmos and the globe. Eventually they got cold feet and all their lucrative contracts went to the likes of DARPA and the NSA, which is partly why their funding dried up so much and everybody stopped paying attention to NASA for a while.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
