Yes, this. And the reason why congressional appropriations plummeted was that no one saw any need to maintain such high expenditures. There hasn’t been an actually coherent vision of what NASA is supposed to be working towards since the Apollo Program. Everything after that is lurching from one project to another, justifying it based on short-term possibility rather than committing to a longer-term goal the agency is supposed to be achieving. Just look at Shuttle. It accomplished some nice things, but it was always a dead end. Everybody in NASA knew it. ISS: accomplished some nice things, dead end. Sure, you can talk about how these were steps along the way to learning about long-term human habitation in space, but we’ve never had a coherent vision for that that everyone is aligned with. What they really were: make-work projects that were at least short-term justifiable, executed in order to preserve NASA’s capacity to do anything at all.
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