Maybe the source of the stagnation in our space program over the last 40 years, Buckethead suggests, is not government mismanagement, lack of vision, underfunding, red tape or any of that.
Maybe we just ran out of Nazis. (I guess we hit Peak Nazi back in the 1960s.)
Rockets have a hard limit of power-vs.-weight trade-offs. Our space program hit a wall in the 70s because we didn’t build Orion.
So, we should have let our Nazis build nuclear-propelled rockets.
US missile programs were not as totally dependent on former Nazi rocket scientists as is often believed. The USAF missile efforts were run by General Bernard Schriever, an American of German ancestry and most definitely not a Nazi or a Nazi supporter. While some of his scientists hailed from the Peenemunde crew, his top rocket designer was Ed Hall, an American of Jewish background.
There’s an interesting biography of General Schriever and his era; my review is here.
In your review of his biography, Schriever comes across as a bit of a Nazi.
More seriously, I remember reading that review and agreeing with you that it was a different time:
The book, A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, is available cheap, via third-party sellers, on Amazon, for those whose bookcases aren’t already groaning under unsafe loads.
Interestingly, so far as I know there were no Nazis on the Orion project. That might have had dire consequences had the program not been axed before test flights in the early sixties.
Another home grown program with a low Nazi coefficient was the kiwi nuclear thermal rocket. Instead of cool exploding atomic bomb propulsion, this was Heinlein-style atomic jets — a nuclear pile superheated hydrogen fuel for propulsion. They actually built a test rocket and fired it, but never built a flying version. That program was cancelled in the late sixties IIRC.
Elon Musk seems to have achieved near-Nazi levels of chemical rocket efficiency with no obvious Nazis. Though one wonders…