> Pretty much ever since then, Republicans, Democrats, and independents have generally supported NASA and civil spaceflight ... at the cost of everything being

> Pretty much ever since then, Republicans, Democrats, and independents have generally supported NASA and civil spaceflight ... at the cost of everything being dog slow and inefficient though. NASA's ability to actually innovate was hamstrung by what's colloquially called "pork barrel politics" [1] - and the same happened here in Europe by the way, Airbus/EADS suffer from the same fate. Every politician wants to have at least a tiny piece of the pork to end up in their district, and no politician wants to be held accountable in headlines like "Representative X voted for expensive multibillion dollar space program that now has ended in <insert catastrophe here>", which means a ton of very expensive on ground validation and tests - and that kind of requirements also requires large financial resources, which led to the consolidation of ULA and in Europe it always has been only Airbus/EADS anyway, so no competitive pressure, and we saw how good that was for Boeing. SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic were able to sidestep all of that crap... the initial demo/seed funding from NASA was either too small for politicians to care about or outright ridiculed ("only large nations can achieve spaceflight, but hey these billionaires are welcome to waste their own money trying"), and I'd argue the very fact they were so successful (especially SpaceX) was only made possible by not being held back by political crap. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_barrel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_barrel