Which is pretty sad as if think about given the number of technologies that were developed for the Apollo program that the private sector went on to make a bundle of cash out of and the number of industries (computing for one) that were spawned as a result.
However, what do you do about the gross inefficiencies of a government organization? I worked for 13 years in the public sector and saw first-hand the layers-upon-layers of management and entire management entities, while undergrads, grads, and a few unsung full-timers actually accomplished the little work that got done.
A massive public organization like NASA simply cannot get anything done for a reasonable budget. Unfortunately, sub-contracting work like we do with Boeing & friends seems to result in just-as-wasteful spending. Outside of the discovery of a commercial incentive, it seems that NASA is still our best hope for getting useful science done, inefficiencies and all.
Assuming the government is grossly inefficient in all aspects is strange. What if some organizations in the government are inefficient, while others are not?
It's like traffic with limited lanes. Decisions have to go thru certain chokes, and if there's a slow driver (inefficient bureaucrat) or a traffic jam (overworked), or a crash (time critical emergency), or a malicious troll (a troll) then things stop or slow down.
Like a big road network, you get enough of these and flow becomes jerky, stop-start, non-linear, and efficiency drops. Meanwhile, nearly all drivers will report that they are good, rule abiding drivers (minus speeding (the occasional minor rule circumvention), which actually helps flow).
Sure, groups become more valuable the bigger they get, cause of the combinatorial link complexity, but they also get harder to get anything done in cause you've got to check all those links to make sure actions will be accepted.
Hierarchies just map this exponential complexity into something closer to an O(log(n)) tree with the caveat that you get flow constrictions as a tradeoff for not having to talk to everyone.
While the root causes may be different, a badly managed organization is the same whether it is public or private.
I think much 3rd world corruption is a weird shadow/echo of Victorian era corruption. In the decades to come, this form of corruption in US governance will become equally quaint and exist in such echoes.
Indeed, were it not for the ultra-secret classification, it's unlikely that anything this ambitions and uncertain would have gotten through a civilian agency that was subject to Congress. In other words, top secret military technology that takes taxpayer support for granted is not all bad. That's an inconvenient truth for some people.
So perhaps we shouldn't have done it? We know it is the right decision now, but only given knowledge that we didn't have at the time. If you play a lottery and win, that doesn't mean it was right to play it in the first place. It just means you were lucky.