I’m just reflecting on the reality of our current existence, NASA spent a lot of money on rockets, It would have been the best possible outcome if NASA “offered things at the lowest possible cost”. But they didn’t, and our timeline missed the miracle where they did that.

NASA has always been used to funnel money to arms dealer companies who actually make rockets for them. Like it never had its own factories or production pipeline, it was always just big handouts to corporate MIC contractors who were further financially incentivized to delay and drive up costs even more since the contracts let them do that completely unchecked.

It was also kept pretty tangential to what the US military wanted: they wanted ICBMs, so NASA did rocket research for them; they wanted satellites, so NASA did satellite launch research for them; they wanted some nonsense contraption for “space commandos” to steal Soviet satellites with, so NASA had to incorporate that into the Space Shuttle program which was further gutted to the point of barely being functional at all.