[thmsths]

Building rockets and probes for a reasonable price and in a reasonable amount of time. SLS was initially billed as "a simple project to reuse a bunch of parts from the Space Shuttle" and yet it's over a decade old, 20 billions in cost and has not launched even once. So we get no real innovation (as I said previously it's just reusing fairly old technologies), it's not cheap and it's not fast. As for keeping the specialists hot; surely there are better ways to do it. It feels like saying let's keep digging ditches and filling them back up to keep our ditch diggers in shape.

[xattt]

This is essentially why roads are full of potholes.

[panick21_]

No it isn't. The roads are full of plotholes because of totally broken local accounting, zoning and tax laws. Go read some 'Strong Towns' stuff if you want to know why roads have potholes.