"The American Space program faced a three way fork in the road in the early 1970s under President Nixon. One road lead to immediate termination of the Space Program. Many people (most of the media pundits) were strongly advocating that path. Another road lead to a more vigorous space program with NASA establishing an outpost on Mars in 1984 (only aerospace engineers and a few visionaries were backing that plan). The third and last path was the slow death approach based upon a non-upgradeable Space Shuttle supporting a useless space station at LEO. Through the use of deception, smoke and mirrors that last path was selected. "

From rear mirror view, probably the best course would been a immediate termination of Space Program. NASA was built from small agency into a larger organization in order to put a man on the Moon. Once the organization had met it's goal and there was no further evolution to this goal [a clear idea of where it was going] the wisest course would been to shut down this huge organization. Instead of doing this we got a bunch of half measures and the general desire to maintain a jobs program. No doubt that terminating NASA would have been a very unpopular decision. But if we had tossed away the govt organization, we might have kept the Saturn V. Instead in order to preserve the organization, and lower it's short term costs, they sacrificed the Saturn V and later did much to destroy the aerospace companies. And ultimately instead usual evolution of high tech lowering in costs, NASA was responsible for increasing them. In the end, NASA did the exact opposite of what it should have been doing.

But I think this route has demonstrated one thing- NASA or any govt agency is incapable of performing the Socialism dream of running businesses at a lower cost- and particularly businesses which are high tech in nature.