>>13091949Government entities are probably the most vulnerable to corruption out of any given group of people. Because even though they are not a for-profit entity, they still need to pay their employees, and in most cases it's much harder to justify firing government employees than private sector ones. This means that innovation can actually harm your government position, because at some point you might innovate yourself out of jobs.
See the shuttle engineers as an example, all of SLS is justified on the fact that most of them are so specialized it is now impossible to retrain them, meaning a rocket which was created from scratch that didn't rely on shuttle tech would necessitate a lot of them being laid off, since they would be unable to retrain entire new skillsets to deal with a new vehicle.
Instead of cope with that loss, NASA and Co. decided to just build a slapdash frankenrocket out of shuttlesurp, in spite of it being strictly inferior to NASA's last flagship vertical stack rocket the Saturn V.
