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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.

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Thanks for your insight on those things.

I consider access to space and ‘first knowledge’ to be very important strategic considerations.

With all the things we waste money on, like half a trillion dollars a year on welfare for folks who could work if they wanted, it amazes me the piddling dollar projects we cancel, due to budget concerns.

The space plane, the particle collider in Texas..., it just seems to me that strategically it is very important that we dominate space access and exploration. Imagine China up there and dominating, destroying our satellites and perhaps blocking access.

Imagine them getting to the Moon or planets first. Is that something we should allow to happen?

Should we allow Europe or China to find the next steps in particle dynamics (or whatever the proper term might be).

We should be at the forefront of these steps in the advancement of knowledge and new frontiers.

Particle dynamics, if you will, will be crucial to new weapons and other advancements we can’t even fathom clearly at the present time.

So we toss all this up in the air and act as if it doesn’t matter, until a crunch time comes and we must play catch-up.

NASA is a great example, as you have pointed out.

We landed on the moon in 1969 48 years ago. We let a half century go by without capitalizing on our achievement and taking next steps.

While I don’t think we should have gone broke doing these things, the costs associated with them pale in comparison to what we literally throw away each year on programs that should never have been started, and should at the very least be parred way way back to the essentials.

I’ve read enough to know that Lockheed and some other entities have evidently achieved some incredible things the public isn’t aware of. I still think we do could do more to discourage other nations from doing things, if we let it be known we’re light years ahead, and it would be futile to go up against us.

We just don’t seem to want to play the strategic games that have to be played to be the premier nation on the planet.

If you look at our domestic situation today, if anything we’re a nation teetering on the bring, a fantastic future or the abyss.

I do see this Trump administration to be our last hope. If this doesn’t pan out, the nation will not make it long into the future IMO. At the best it would result in even more of the movie Idocracy playing out in the U.S.

We’ve got to go after Soros and weed out the networks of the Left.

Of course that’s if we have the will to survive.

I’m just not convinced we do, looking at things as they are today in the United States.