Earth launch is the most difficult part of solar system travel due to higher gravity than most landing/launching targets, and Earth’s atmospheric maxQ force on

Earth launch is the most difficult part of solar system travel due to higher gravity than most landing/launching targets, and Earth’s atmospheric maxQ force on launch, etc. Given we had already achieved that, adding orbital refueling and landing/reuse are both more control issues than materials issues. We had the science to go anywhere. We just needed to stay focused on the engineering and iterate, instead of going sideways burning money to maintain a completely unmaintainable unreliable faux-reusable less capable design. A situation so politically intolerable that management ”coped” by operating in denial, and so objectively broken that small issues in a sea of complexity produced deadly disasters. Normal iterative improvements were sacrificed for decades, to prop up a bad design.