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Perhaps you're right. On the other hand, though, we should expect this to increase their competency, though, since they are going to be less distorted by that friction; instead it seems their competency has declined.
NASAs competency has been consistently lousy since the end of the Apollo program, no?
I don't know enough inside NASA baseball to say exactly when there seemed to be a fall-off, but I do seem to recall some screw-ups in the 1970s with the Mars probes. None of that stuff seems as severe as the SLS slow motion dumpster fire, but perhaps that's recency bias?
I have a loosely-held mental model that the Great Depression/New Deal/Second World War/GI Bill shook loose a lot of latent American talent and channeled it into the public sphere. That talent persisted until relatively recently! If you went into, say, the Department of Energy at 25 in 1950 and retired at 75, you worked until 2000. But (for a variety of reasons) there's been a talent decline (as well as a lot of restraint on administrative action) since then, and it's manifested in a gradual way over time as competent people are, more often than not, replaced by less competent people.
I reckon that's an oversimplication at best but I do think it makes sense.
The STS (shuttle) was also a slow-motion dumpster fire. At least until Challenger exploded, at which point its pace increased.
I don't think it's a matter of time or talent, but just incentives. The public and the politicians were very interested in the moon program, and cared a great deal about results in the form of putting Americans on the moon (and getting them back!). Later programs didn't have either that mandate or that pressure.
Possibly almost as important was Werner von Braun's retirement, but that couldn't be the full story because there were a lot of things to the moon program besides the rockets themselves.
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