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The tragedy of it is that the stupid politics were an intended feature of the original program. NASA got really spooked when the Apollo program got castrated ju
by Tuna-Fish 5y ago
The tragedy of it is that the stupid politics were an intended feature of the original program. NASA got really spooked when the Apollo program got castrated just when they were starting to do real science instead of just testing hardware and delivering flags, and so they strived to make the program after that impossible for congress to kill.
Jokes on them, the contracts started then are still impossible to kill today, and none of them have produced anything of real value for 20 years now.
- SEJeff 5y agoNot fully true. Much of the initial NASA tech was transferred over to the Department of Defense and is used for ICBMs and various missiles. There is a lot of overlap with NASA and the DoD when it comes to these things. The difference is that the DoD basically has infinite budget when they really ask and NASA has a paltry percentage.
- ncmncm 5y agoExcept, it isn't used in ICBMs. Expensive parts of STS are not used in anything except maybe X37, which by all indications is useless, spending years parked in orbit just so it doesn't look totally disused.
- greedo 5y agoI think this is backwards. The majority of the launch technology used by NASA (the rockets themselves, not the capsules etc) were military. It wasn't until the Saturn system that bespoke rockets were being used, IIRC.
- SEJeff 5y agoThe technology, the wind tunnels, the materials science. Much of it overlaps with military applications and the DoD works with NASA. The original NASA was military only. Then an all civilian nasa was formed and the two quasi competed. There is a really good overview of this in Chuck Yaeger’s autobiography.