From Man's First Moonwalk to Today...

[karam]

I feel the same about the Concorde.

 

[Swiss Army Knife]

I feel the same about the Concorde.

I can respect people not wanting to live underneath constant sonic booms but damn, what a cool plane.

Well... NASA is a bloated, inefficient mess, and we pay the Russians and assorted private outfits to lift our satellites as needed.

To be fair to NASA there's a good reason for this, or at least one that makes sense. One of the big hurdles these days for NASA is everyone wants them to do everything all at once for as little money as possible. They need to create big heavy lift vehicles that are also very cheap, reusable, don't pollute the environment at all and completely safe with no possibility of failure or threat to human life. All on less budget than they had the last time they had to develop a new launch system.

It's a lot easier to just have a company like SpaceX do it. And besides NASA still does really cool missions, the most recent mars rover dropped a tiny drone that flies around on the martian surface.