Private Space Exploration and a Future without NASA

I aggregated a post about the passing of Neil Armstrong the other day, but had missed some bits and pieces about his position on the space program. Could we one day see a world without NASA?

Armstrong was a proponent of continued manned space exploration, but he believed that the state should be in charge of running the program. He dismissed the wasteful spending by NASA, and even the lack of choice by taxpayers to fund these endeavors. Without a voluntary choice to fund the program, it is difficult to find benefit from it's actions.

Armstrong was against the privatization or outsourcing of portions of the space program, yet Boeing has been significantly involved in since the inception of the program, and they are just one of a hundred or more. And this was during Armstrong's time with NASA. He was against privatization, yet his career benefited from it.

Considering that NASA has been a massive boondoggle from the beginning, producing enormous amounts of wasteful spending and even considerable conflicts of interest, I would say that Armstrong was either simply defending the corrupt system from which he benefited so greatly, or he was entirely unaware of the free market efficiencies and accountability created by shifting space exploration from public to private industry.

Seeing how inexpensively companies like SpaceX have been able to do what NASA took exponentially more resources to do (and sans consent of those from which funds are extracted), it's high time to abandon NASA and take advantage of the potential of private space exploration. Thankfully, we already seem to be moving toward private space exploration, and it's capitalistic benefits.