Why US Government cancelled Apollo Program

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NASA is a spent force.

The Russians could have upstaged the Americans if they put a Woman on the Moon.

Silly as that sounds that might well have prolonged the apollo program by a few years by prolonging the PR battle between the superpowers. The whole thing was fueled by PR anyway. We would have had to respond by putting a BLACK woman astronaut on the moon to prove that we are even more equal oportunity than thou.

Maybe they wouldve found a Jewish Chechen lady qualified to be a cosmonaut in response to that (to show how nice they are to their minorties).

But after a few years it still would have petered out.

What about having sex on the moon?

The quarter million mile high club.

NASA figures that if they have a heavy-lift platform, missions will find them. It's the same strategy the management of the late 60s came up with re: the Space Transport System (STS), which became the Columbia-class orbiter. Maintain the launch capacity at all costs, and a mission will find you. It ended up that they could'nt deliver on the performance promises, and lost out on the entire launch market. Then they were reduced to congress's largress, backed up by the millions of space junkies.

To this day, it's not clear if NASA's mistake was switching to a winged model before the technology was ready (it still is'nt), or the STS was really a desperate attempt to save heavy-launch capacity, and they had to spend the money before the entire space industry was scrapped.

They really ought to stop spending money on building a launcher that will be surpassed by a private launcher before it's even finished...

Yes, SpaceX are working on a super-heavy lift rocket, bigger than the Falcon Heavy, that will outcompete NASA's 130 tonne-to-orbit one.

The main problem with NASA is it's a jobs program. Hence why they use dangerous solid rocket boosters when liquid fuelled ones are much safer and cheaper, being easier to reuse.

Then they decided that mixing cargo and crew was a good idea, even though the former doesn't need as safe a launcher but just adds much more mass to the crewed vehicle...

I agree 100% with your later two sentences.

I disagree they should stop spending money on a heavy-lift option. One of the reasons why DoD stopped backing the STS was that they had been talked/forced into dropping other heavy launch options, since the shuttle would do everything. That did'nt work out very well for any party.

There's no way the US should be forced to rely on any one outside heavy launch platform, particularly one that has'nt launched yet. At least part of the Ares (a name I dislike) platform has already been succesfully field tested, and a large portion was previously successful through the STS. There are real US demands for an organic capacity to launch heavy loads, and so far, no one else has come up with a succesful platform.