>>28591261
I'm willing to buy that that may have been one of the rationalizations. Maybe even a big one. But by that point the rot had already set in, and they didn't have the capability to do anything else, either.
In the early to mid twentieth century when georgetown needed a functional military industrial complex to conquer the world, for every one system that went into service you had dozens of protypes that didn't, because exploring potentially 'wrong' tech wasn't a problem when you had a bunch of different powerful organizations with the competence and capital to spare pursuing many different threads at once.
A mere couple of decades later though, when georgetown felt it had no more need of overly mighty servants, and was far more concerned with undermining the possibility of any potential rivals at home then abroad, the incipient technocracy is strangled in the crib. Now, you have a committee of bureaucrats debating what they 'think' is going to be the right technology before hand, and that's the only one that gets funding - and no iterative testing or rapid prototyping either, because 'failed' tests look bad in the minds of the bureaucrat who authorized it.
And that's how it takes over 20 years just to get a new space telescope.