Should NASA define the goals and leave research and production to the private sector?
What happened is NASA got into the business of procuring large systems and had no experience with that. They wound up creating a procurement process, which duplicated the military procurement process that took 200 years to evolve. I think a cooperative effort with the technological lead being NASA, the procurement lead being the military (who know how to procure large programs), and the engineering lead being industry is a pretty good combination. That’s the military/industrial complex, which has proven to be a very powerful weapon against the world. The research airplane program was pretty economical when you consider what we got for it. The entire program from the X-1 through the X-15 33 years with about 30 different configurations of about 13 different airplanes all that explosion of technology and engineering, cost less than $500 million. Apollo cost about $40 billion. Programs that don’t make major milestones in five years are pretty much doomed to extinction. When you have the co
