Did you know that the NASA outspends the rest of the civilian world put together? It had a $15bn budget for 2003, and that’s not counting the $12bn forked out to the US military for its space applications. China apparently spent something around $1.5-3bn a year on its civilian+military space programs combined (source: BBC World). If I were a betting man, there’d be no doubt which one I’d bet on to accomplish more.

To be fair, NASA spends a lot of money on deep space research, with no one else does; however the point of this is that NASA’s manned space programmes have been so ossified by bureaucracy that they are no longer efficient.