I agree.
You know, that wasn’t something I was in tune with all along. You expect them to take care of things. Then you find out some of the things they did, and it seems very destructive.
Who thinks like that?
Academics and bureaucrats. Very turf-sensitive and vicious about maintaining their power base.
Also, re your prior post: NASA gave Lockheed the contract to develop a shuttle replacement at the same time they were running around killing DC-X and Rotary. What we got was the X-33 which was to beget the VentureStar ‘space plane’. Only problem was that they designed the fuel tank last and it turned out to be unbuildable. After going way, way over budget, funding was finally killed off in 2001. NASA and Lockheed later claimed that they’d figured out how to build the fuel tank in 2004 but oddly nobody ever made a test model...
I find it extremely poetic justice that NASA is now reduced to relying on the private space industry they tried so hard to kill off from the 80s to the 2000s and buying rides from the Russians. Not great for the US in space, but poetic justice for the NASA asshat administrators who so successfully wreaked havoc with the private sector.