[core_dumped]

No one is under the illusion it’s his cult of personality unless they are themselves in the cult.

Also, serious engineering chops WITHOUT the billions of dollars doesn’t get you very far anyway. It’s not like there is an abundance of organizations with the resources to compete with spaceX.

If the US budget was properly balanced for that as opposed to more war maybe we would’ve gotten self landing rockets and more by now…

[timschmidt]

Lack of funding is not among the top reasons the US space program never produced a reusable rocket. The US space program, like most nation state space programs, is organized as much to keep weapons developers employed as to build rockets. It was the reason we cooperated with Russia on the ISS. As such, the projects get split and sub-contracted to many different suppliers in ways which prevent the sort of top-down integrated whole-systems engineering required for reusability. Changes to make one part more reusable necessitate changes in other parts of the vehicle, and the moment those cross systems boundaries that span different organizations, you're screwed.