was too much like Washington D.C.:

"Imagine an ancient Rome in which everyone was fascinated by gadgets, in which work by hand or abacus was viewed as honorable (honestus), in which the occupiers of aristocratic status and other non-working positions were commonly portrayed as stupid and lazy, in which engineers and inventors were heroes, in which millionaires had heroic biographies written about them – and you would be imagining a Rome that would have had an industrial revolution. Ditto, with a somewhat different list of counterfactuals, for Song China, say, or the Abbasid Caliphate. But instead the great Hellenistic engineer, Archimedes, declared that “the work of an engineer and every art that ministers to needs of life is ignoble and vulgar.” (Deirdre McCloskey)

If NASA thinks we need to redistribute some resources, I can think of a bloated and self-indulgent agency where we could cut deeply and no one would be poorer for it.

WW