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.

NASA has launched countless orbital research platforms, including Hubble and Chandra, sent numerous probes out into deep space, including the Mars rover and New Horizons (among many others), was a leader in the design and assembly of the International Space State, and continues to run experiments and tests designed with the ultimate goal of getting us to Mars.

 

They might not have figured out a way to lob us to distant planets in the last 30 years, but to say that no tech breakthroughs were made is just flat wrong.

 

ETA: NASA does have competition, from other governments and, more recently, the private market. One of the stated reasons for terminating the shuttle program and not replacing it was that shuttles had become simply ferries to the ISS and repair platforms for satellites, functions that NASA believed the private sector was nearly ready to take over at costs much lower than what NASA could do.

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