Quote:Budget cuts may be a legitimate excuse now. But the NASA budget was flush with taxpayer money for most of the 30+ years of the Shuttle program, yet no tech breakthroughs were developed at NASA in those 30 years. Even the ill-fated Ares program just proposed re-using the same boosters from the shuttle. Now NASA is developing the Orion capsule. Nearly sixty years since Alan Shepard and we're back to capsules.


Government programs stagnate when they have no competition. Rarely do they have competition.