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NASA funding far exceeds SpaceX’s and always has. It shouldn’t take 4% of the US federal budget (NASA funding during Apollo) to run a hardware-rich design process!

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Apollo was wound down because the government wanted NASA to focus on the space shuttle and all sorts of other things as well as slashing the total budget by a huge amount.

So, while in theory it may have had the money, in practice it did not.

The Shuttle cost $48 billion to develop in inflation-adjusted dollars — contrast this with the ~$5B spent on Starship development thus far. It’s hard to defend the claim that NASA is or ever has been under-funded.

NASAs "do stuff" budget is super small because their "keep all the experts on staff" budget is insatiable.

It's not entirely bad though, I'm sure lots of those folks are doing good and important stuff. But I don't think the balance between employment and building things is quite right. At least to my tastes.

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