Originally Posted by
NineEighteen
China presumably have the advantage of not being castrated by political ebb and flow as Nasa finds itself every few years.
Here's hoping that someone responsible achieves that feat and, more importantly, pushes straight onwards from there.
There's much more to it than that. In the 1960's, NASA was lean and mean (at least by government standards) with a 'can do' attitude. There are many parallels between 1960's NASA and today's SpaceX.
Today, NASA has morphed into just another bureaucratic monstrosity that is more concerned with protecting their careers than with actually getting things done. In the 1960's, NASA went from the sub-orbital Mercury Redstone to Apollo 8 orbiting the moon in less than 8 years.
It took longer than that from the retirement of the Space Shuttle to when NASA was again capable of putting people into orbit (without depending on the Russians) - and even then they needed Space X to actually get it done.