On the other hand, new launch vehicles are good for jobs. Well, probably only in Huntsville and nowhere else, but Sen. Shelby will see to it that nothing happens to that work, even if its to the determinant of NASA as a whole.

I always suspected that to be true regarding Apollo project.

Well...

Today I see how much Soyuz-2 costs vs. how much spacecraft Soyuz costs... and wonder - may be it's still trickier to create Apollo and LEM than Saturn-V, even though in Russian history H1 turned out to be harder to make than the payloads...

Rockets are doing roughly the same thing, since 1957 - get things to orbit. While payloads keep changing - with all those stations, telescopes, probes, monitoring satellites etc. Rockets aren't that much "rocket science" anymore - but the payloads surely are. So may be - just may be - this law can be amended, a little bit.