This space for rent: NASA considers ads on spacecraft - good or bad?

[Angrboda]

I think in microcosm, it appears to be an expedient way for National ASA to get closer to the next potentially worthy goal.

In the macrocosm, it represents another worrisome diminution of the concept that there can be larger and longer term public good greater in overall value to the society than the sum of the value of successful profit seeking by private cooperations and individuals.   This is because it further weakens the practical mechanism (public funding) that enable such greater public good to be effectively pursued in defiance of private individual and cooperations’s desire to withhold as much resource as possible from the public good in order to devote it to pursuit of private profit.

This reminds me of a recent article I read about atheists and charity (here). The ultimate point of the article was that atheists (and liberals) tend to prefer to give back to society through the compulsory mechanism of taxation. To that end, perhaps this does represent a worrisome step away from compulsory funding of scientific ventures such as space exploration and a step towards privatization. I'm not sure though that I can agree that this is necessarily a bad thing. At minimum, you'd have to establish why it is bad, rather than simply assert that the alternative, public funding of NASA, is in and of itself good (or better). The typical arguments against private or commercial funding here do not all seem to work. I could see the possibility that sponsored missions receive priority over unsponsored missions, but it's a questionable assumption that such would occur. Maybe it can't help but happen. Other complaints about commercialization and privatization, such as decreased efficiencies, higher costs, and increased fraud and corruption seem unlikely. Those are the typical arguments against deriving funding from non-government sources, and I don't see them as applying here.