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Yeah the social-demographic situation precludes any serious achievements in my opinion.
There's a story apparently from a US sailor posted aboard an Indian warship - complete clown show (but good food): https://old.reddit.com/r/LessCredibleDefence/comments/9uwqzk/iama_us_naval_officer_who_spent_5_days_onboard/
Even the US is only a pale shadow of its former glory when it comes to competence. Look how long it's taking to get back to the Moon, consider how US warships have also been crashing because of inadequate training and general incompetence, magnified by DEI. But they're still well ahead of India.
It's a little bit like post-apartheid South Africa (but not nearly so bad in terms of visible decline). There is a smart fraction in South Africa. But they're not in power. The people in power are beholden to special interests, the machinery of government requires immense lubrication (corruption) just to sustain itself. There's no capacity for the kinds of intensive reforms needed to get things working again.
IMHO this is evidence of increased competence, not decreased. We spent hundreds of billions of (inflation-adjusted) dollars to develop the Apollo program, with a marginal cost of billions of dollars per mission, and because we prized speed over sustainability we had very little to show for it in the end besides expendable rockets we couldn't afford to keep using. Even SLS (at mere tens of billions of dollars to develop!) isn't that bad, and Starship HLS (a few billion NASA dollars, on top of a few more billions of private investment with an actual expected return and commercial use cases, with sub-billion-dollar marginal costs at worst) is an absolute bargain by comparison. The major flaw of Starship HLS is that high capabilities come with a high level of technical risk (though not quite as high as I thought it was before I watched the giant robot arms catch the decelerating megarocket on their first try...), and we're even mitigating that now with Blue Moon as backup. There's definitely some structural problems inherent to the way everyone always pretends to believe that this time the brand-new aerospace development programs won't be delayed, but we're at least getting something out of the delays.
I agree that going to the Moon then was a waste of time, a fundamentally ill-conceived PR stunt. But it was executed very well! They had to invent just about everything they needed, including computers. They faced far more constraints than the Artemis program in terms of materials, technology, doing things for the first time. However progress on Artemis has been very slow and not that cheap either.
$93 Billion has already been spent (in contrast to $200-250 billion on Apollo) and nobody is on the Moon, it doesn't seem that NASA has gotten any more efficient, despite enormous advancements in the last 60 years. SpaceX of course is a different story.
I think it's a little like consumer computer software. The hardware gets enormously more powerful but the software runs just as slowly due to shoddy practices and bloat piling up. There is no excuse for Microsoft Word to lag for several seconds as I load a 2800 KB document on a very fast PC but it does anyway!
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