If you privatize, you connect yourself to the people, and the more people the better. Then when you go to Congress and ask them for money for the pure research projects you do best, they love you, because the public is now behind Congress. They feel they are connected to space and your budgets grow instead of shrinking year after year. The American space industry is incomplete. It has been only for the select few.
Flights are infrequent.
Flights are pitifully expensive. And the public knows, and the Congress knows the public knows, that none of it is for them. I'll tell you what it is. It's an agency that can be the greatest on earth in the 21st century, but may not be if it doesn't change its ways. Among other things, it is now time and strategically vital if NASA wants to enhance its public support and sincerely take an affirmative step toward privatization to designate at least one seat on the shuttle on every flight for people other than astronauts and politicians.