Posted by Shyaku on July 31, 2019, 6:47 am, in reply to "Re: Moon Landings"
...is that the inmates took over the asylum. It went from President Kennedy setting the agenda, in the heady early 1960s, to, by the early 1980s, the contractors selliing NASA the brooklyn bridge.
Basically, Lockheed and Boeing (I think) said they could build and do the launch work for a resumable craft. As with anything sold by govt contractors, it turned out to be bull - look at the F35 fighter. The early 80s was the start of the era of corporate capture. THey f'cked nasa, now nasa is getting all of this "So why haven't they done this? Why can't they do that? Human space flight is far, far more expensive than robot missions that they still excel at.
In the 60s and 70s, they had some of this trouble (20 dollar washers etc), but the national mission to get to the moon before the USSR, along with the general influence of congress etc. still being pretty strong, kept things on track. By the 80s, the lobbyists had started to call the tune.