A very good, low-cost, consumer electric car that can compete with gasoline cars and hybrids is a harder problem than putting cargo in orbit. It's also a harder

A very good, low-cost, consumer electric car that can compete with gasoline cars and hybrids is a harder problem than putting cargo in orbit. It's also a harder problem than intercontinental fiber optic networks and supersonic flight. That's why we have all those things and still drive 1900s internal combustion engines around. On the flip side, this shows us that space flight is not as hard as people commonly think it is, and that the reason it stagnated post-Apollo had more to do with NASA and the DOD's bureaucratic bumbling than with the inherent difficulty of it. Two things happened post-Apollo to hamstring space flight. One, Nixon cancelled the Saturn program and pushed the Shuttle, a stupid white elephant that ate up NASA's budget for 15+ years. Two, congress turned the space program into a pork program for influential districts, constantly moving goal-posts and creating and then scuttling programs to keep the pork flowing.