It&#x27;s really not you had parts built all over due to politics each with a different quality control process which lead to issues of major parts not fitting properly because they were manufactured to slightly different tolerances, about 40% of the tiles have had to be rejects due to this for example, major engine components also have had this issues.
Also due to politics the shuttles have had to be assembled in California and then flown to Florida which was very expensive process.
Government projects are tend to be designed as too big to fail and bring as much work to as many states as possible because that what gets you the vote.
This isn&#x27;t an argument against NASA, NASA is very much needed there are a few fields you do not want to hand off to the private industry completely (and ideally not at all) and space exploration is one of them.<p>SpaceX is for the time being more or less a unicorn because it is privately held and for the time being Elon Musk does not have to answer on every decision to shareholders when it will come to that the overall level of innovation will slow down, commercial space flight isn&#x27;t a bad idea but commercial altruistic space exploration is a pipe dream in the long run.
You will not find many companies that will be willing to take on a 20-30 years Mars project for nothing than their own fame, yes working for NASA on such projects is very lucrative but in the absence of NASA it just wont work because there will be very little financial drive to do so. ULA&#x2F;LM doesn&#x27;t want to go to Mars they want NASA to choose Orion and their launcher to go to Mars and pay them heavily to develop and build it even if it never gets used.