NASA was wasteful and full of contractor corruption during Apollo as well. They just had the political will to get funded and keep pushing forward so they did.

NASA was wasteful and full of contractor corruption during Apollo as well. They just had the political will to get funded and keep pushing forward so they did. The stagnation in aerospace is mostly due to us running into fundamental limits of physics pretty quickly, not due to some kind of work ethic or creative failures. to keep pushing forward in space would have required another order of magnitude in funding, and funding during Apollo was already huge. That said, I wouldn't mind if all the worlds military $$$ had been dumped into mars colonization either.