Around 83 percent of NASA’s facilities are beyond their design lifetimes, and the agency has a $3.3 billion backlog in maintenance.
Having just submitted an article about a commercial spacewalk, I’m depressed that space is destined to be owned by corporations. This won’t get funded. Politicians will point to how much more efficient private companies do this. Eff.
This was by design to kickstart the private industry for space development.
NASA could have just kept building and flying space shuttles, but since the retirement of the space shuttle program in 2011, they were renting payload space on Russian rockets to get stuff into orbit.
Getting off of dependence on Russian rockets turned out to be tremendous foresight.