re: Amazing.
Frosch, who served as NASA administrator during the Carter administration, said his decision to press ahead with the shuttle program despite opposition from some quarters as his best decision. "Whatever I thought of the dimensions of the program itself, the politics was clearly such that, at that time, if there was not going to be a shuttle, there was not going to be a NASA," he recalled. "That was a really terrible idea."
Unfortunately, that's pretty much the driving force of the whole NASA manned space program.
It's not about the product, it's about the health and expansion of the bureaucracy.
To NASA, a twenty-year multi-billion dollar program that turns out a dead-end technology is a success, assuming of course the agency can move directly to the next one.