>>12201568>follyYes and no.
The production of the shuttle is an object lesson in just how off the rails big government projects can be.
It's an absolute feat of engineering, but that being said it was so fucking expensive that NASA spent almost three full decades building their entire manned space flight initiative around the shuttle, which was plagued with so many compromises it wasn't great at doing much beyond being a space truck to low earth orbit.
The ISS is similar in that in order to justify its existence and budget they shoe horn as many missions around it as possible.
Robert Zubrin has talked about how he had the original plan for mars direct thrown in his face because it didn't utilize the space station so he came back with a second draft that required 3 launches instead of 2 and end up costing more just because.
