Lag time is a big part of NASA’s problem. Huge lag between Apollo and STS, huge lag between STS and this fiasco. There should have been continual, organic, evolutionary development from Saturn-V to the present day.
Unsurprisingly, blame for most of this lies at the feet of racist, communist “democrats” in Congress.
Yup. Lag time between Apollo and Shuttle wasn’t this bad. And the Shuttle was retired with a lot of life left on the vehicles.
I was unaware how expansive the Apollo program was, until I started digging around in the historical documents.
They had plans for about 120 Saturn V launches. Ultimately, there were only 12 or 13 built. Manned missions to Mars, a landing, right around 1984 - 1986.
Because of the great distances involved, there are certain launch windows or time periods where the energy expended or required to get there (and back) is much less. About 7 to 8 months to get there.
Supposedly the NASA budget was around 5 percent of the GNP at one point. The funding peaked about 1964 or so, after that it went down, and they were already cutting missions by the time Apollo 11 was successful. 18, 19, 20. It really was kind of a shame, since the money, the initial outlay was so large - and then they threw it all away, it looks like. The Shuttle ... was a joke. The flying brick. America had a clear lead in space exploration and technology, and provided hundreds of thousands of jobs, and cutting edge research at leading universities.