Steady decline of U.S. launch marketshare. Why?

        Page 18 of this Commerce Department report http://www.ta.doc.gov/space/library/reports/2001-06-trends.pdf officially documented how the USA slipped to having just 29% of the world’s commercial launch marketshare in the year 2000, even though it had 48% of it in 1996, and apparently nearly ALL of it a decade before then.   How did this happen if NASA has both a larger space budget than practically all of the rest of the world's civilian space agencies COMBINED (source: www.EuroConsult-ec.com), as well as a legal obligation set forth in its Congressionally amended charter to "seek and encourage, to the maximum extent possible, the fullest commercial use of space"?    Other countries evolved from being essentially nonplayers in space 2 decades ago, to possessing dominant commercial players today.   This transpired even as the USA shedded merely a little of its space-related statist baggage left over from the Cold War, while astonishingly missing the chance to avoid fading into commercial obscurity.


 

Has NASA been stifling commercial space ventures that could otherwise outperform it?

Legal and governmental reforms needed to jumpstart the space industry...

Is it wi$e to maintain NASA´s official government agency monopoly?

selected brief excerpts from President Eisenhower´s Farewell Address.