The Space Shuttle’s technology is indeed quite old, but by today’s standards it is not exactly outdated. What matters is that we have lost the ability to carry out that technology — or even the ability to organize and coordinate a project like that. Otherwise, the price of the SLS as an “off-the-shelf product” would not be so outrageous, and it would not keep getting delayed again and again. Technology gets forgotten and capability is lost as people and suppliers disappear. The fact that we could build the Saturn V half a century ago does not mean we could still build it today; even the fact that we could build the F-22 twenty years ago does not mean we could still produce it now once the production lines are gone. Restoring that capability is always a good thing, considering the indirect effects.

Because we have gone backwards so any advancement requires some repetition.

Strange that SpaceX doesn’t seem to be suffering from that limitation. Could it be that the real problem is pork barrel spending and government wastefulness?

Which mission went to the moon?

Why would they go to the moon? They’re far too busy doing things that actually matter, such as slashing launch costs by 80% or more, while achieving the highest reliability of any launch system ever.

So a bunch of things every other space program does.

What are you talking about? SLS is on the way to the Moon now. Starship is still in development. SpaceX only exists because of massive NASA subsidy. Any success from SpaceX is thanks to NASA.

NASA provided SpaceX some money as a startup to bet they could just start commercial space, and they won to the tune of saving millions of dollars. There was never massive subsidies and there isn’t any subsidies at all today.

This is a lie. SpaceX has received at least 3.5 billion dollars from NASA for contracts. You can claim these aren’t subsidies but they are direct funding that allowed SpaceX to build up revenue streams like Starlink using the launch vehicles paid for by NASA. It’s the exact same funding model that Boeing takes advantage of. SpaceX would not exist without NASA. They’re collaborators, not competitors.

>We're redoing things we did before most people in this thread were even born

oh really? show me a picture of the dark side of the moon then

not a reconstruction, not touched up crap based on data like that black hole pic that went viral a few years ago, an actual photograph taken by an astronaut of the dark side of the moon

The first orbit of the moon by a manned spacecraft was Apollo 8 in 1968.

The first photos of the dark side of the moon were taken by the Soviet Luna-3 probe in 1959.

Nothing being done here is revolutionary.