. . . In the 1960s the USoA put people on the moon in 8 years from a standing start with 1960s Dodge Rambler technology. Now they're talking a bullshit 15 years to do it with 45 years newer tech. You gotta wonder what's happened.
What happened is that rocket scientists like Werner Von Braun aren't running NASA any more, it's run by brown-nosing political hacks more interested in getting an "attaboy" from their poltical patrons than in exploring space.
For example, politics played a dominant role in
both shuttle disasters.
For the first, the seamless solid boosters proposed by Aerojet in Florida were rejected, as Senator Jake Garn of Utah - a former astronaut himself - insisted that the SRB components be rail-trasportable. Aerojet's seamless SRBs would be recovered by barge, refurbished at Aerojet's coastal facility, and then barged back to the Cape. But they were TOO LONG to be rail-transportable. So with the rail requirement, the sectional booster was chosen, and Morton-Thiokol got the contract. And when the segments sprung a leak during liftoff - a leak that would not have occured with the seamless booster - the
Challenger was lost. (Guess what state Morton-Thiokol is located in. Duh.)
In the second case, NASA switched to "green" foam insulation on the liquid fuel tank. NASA's OWN website reported problems with the "green" foam in that it kept falling off in chunks, but going back to what worked wouldn't be doing the "green" thing so political correctness kept them using the new stuff. And a chunk fell off, putting a hole in
Columbia's wing, resulting in loss of spacecraft and crew over Texas.
Third case, the Large Space Telescope. A superb optical design was prepared, and the main mirror was ground and polished . . . TO THE WRONG FORMULA! Management, confident in their own omnipotence and eager to save a few dollars, wouldn't even authorize a simple knife-edge test which would have caught this error . . . for a small fraction of 1% of the fabrication cost. Result? A defective mirror was launched.
Ever read the comic strip Dilbert? The pointy-haired manager & others of his ilk are running NASA . . . and the VA . . . and the CDC . . . and the DOT . . . and the DOD . . . and the DOE . . . and the efforts of all the good people below them (and yes, there still
are some good people) are undone or actively blocked by these <expletives deleted>.