Obama recently announced that he would be cancelling NASA's Constellation moon mission program and would instead turn those responsibilities over to private industry. So in the future NASA will see itself as a prime research developer of space technology and once these new applications become advanced they will privatize the operations.
This is something that has been in the works for years. NASA has long maintained that when the day came that it would cost effective to begin mining operations on the Moon and other planetary bodies that they would privatize the program and let corporations make the profits.
The federal government will still use taxpayers dollars to subsidize space colonization but they will largely put the money into the hands of the corporations.
In an important way, by privatizing space colonization operations, the taxpayers will have even less influence over the space program in the years ahead.
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