NASA is obligated to share their work with Americans. Many products ship with tech NASA invented that probably would not have been shared if a private enterprise came up with it.
Are you joking? The only point of doing private sector research is to build something out of it. We receive those advances as new products.
And NASA doesn't gift it's advances to americans, it shares technologies with private companies that share them in the exact same way. You and I still had to pay for our Tang, it was never free.
NASA is a huge inefficient bureaucracy hamstrung by a fickle and corrupt congress. As brilliant as it's engineers are, and they are very brilliant, their projects are extremely fragile, often getting canceled or not funded for ridiculous reasons, or having ridiculous conditions applied to them that slow development (such as parting work out to the less qualified across many congressional districts).
The largest project NASA is investing most of it's resources in is the SLS. It's not revolutionary. It's not a significant advance. It's just a large launch system that's mostly re-using old technologies. It does nothing to lower launch costs. It does nothing to advance re-usablity. It's not a solution to making deep space manned space exploration economically viable.
Any engineers who work on the SLS are engineers denied to SpaceX, Blue Origin, ULA, Sierra Nevada, or a dozen more cost-efficient space launch companies. NASA's competition for engineers raises engineering costs for everyone else. It's wasteful investment in a pork barrel project like SLS diverts revenues that could fund far more efficient launch systems at private companies, and give NASA far more manned launch capacity and much sooner.
Right now engineers at private companies are doing far more to advance economically viable space travel than NASA. Let's thank NASA for the Saturn program, but realize that everything they've done since has been hugely wasteful of resources and detrimental to advancing the cause of space travel.
Tang isn't a NASA invention, it was invented by Kraft. It tastes terrible and no one bought it until NASA used it[0].
But lets run with that. If NASA had invented they wouldn't manufacture and give it away, they would give away the recipe and entrepreneuring businesses could make it to sell if they wanted.
This is exactly what happened with Memory Foam. A NASA contractor invented it as part of the contract so they couldn't keep it secret[1] and it worked its way into a ton of products.
I think you are correct that SLS is not ideal. But I don't think that is really applicable, their inefficiency as business is perhaps understandable because they are not a business. They take their direction from Congress and congress told them to make a ship out of parts they had laying around and that was the SLS.
If we wanted to look at their other missions, they have landed several things on mars and orbited distant planets. Feats no private enterprise has done (yet). All the research from that is available amateur astronomers routinely use to discover new things, like exoplanets in old data.
Designs for things they made like their rocket motors is made available, and that is how Space-X started, by looking at NASA plans for their rockets and picking and choosing the parts they thought most practical.
Again, the inventor of memory foam isn't going to hide it, they are going to create products out of it or license it. So the idea that NASA "shares" is immaterial.
Calling the SLS "not ideal" is like saying a Tsunami will get you wet.
SpaceX benefited as much from NASA as NASA benefited from the Nazis, and as the Nazi's benefited from Goddard. Research marches on.
But currently the most important R&D in the space business is being done by SpaceX. The only way space travel becomes economically viable is through re-usablity, which NASA has not made any credible attempts at solving.
And NASA isn't inefficient because it's not a business. It's inefficient because it's being used to distribute pork barrel spending to specific congressional districts. If the most efficient way to build the SLS was to build it in Puerto Rico, it would never happen because Puerto Rico doesn't have any congressional votes. Instead NASA is forced to break up projects across a massive number of congressional districts and do each sub-task in the most costly way possible so the sub contractors in those districts get a big taste of excess profits to spread around the district.
