No, people look at what NASA was able to accomplish during the 1960s and compare it to now, and wonder how the level of competence can be so drastically lower now vs. then. NASA was not infallible during the 1960s, but the level of engineering competence was much higher.
You think a telescope that launched over a decade late and cost 10x the budget is a mark of "high competence"? I don't think being a useful science tool is enough.
What's the other telescope you have in mind?
And those two free telescopes from NRO are still sitting idle. One of them is supposed to finally launch after 15 years, though apparently it's in such a complex and high budget mission it might not be saving any money to use it there.
The combined Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs cost around $30 billion in then year dollars, which equates to about $300 billion in today's dollars. That's an average of about $25 billion a year over 12 years. That's about the same as what is being spent per year on NASA now.
NASA was doing plenty of unmanned missions during the Mercury-Gemini-Apollo years: the Explorer, Pioneer, Echo, Ranger, Telstar, Mariner, Lunar Explorer, and Surveyor programs all had multiple missions in that time period. So no, I don't buy the argument that NASA has to spread its budget over many more missions now as compared to then.
Many of those you mentioned are still part of the goal of getting a human on the moon. That's like saying Starliner's Demo flights don't count as human-rated because they were uncrewed. About a one third to one half of NASA's budget is dedicated to exploration and space operations which is a better comparison for what you're driving at. The rest is spread across science, aeronautics, environmental, educational outreach, and other goals.
> Many of those you mentioned are still part of the goal of getting a human on the moon.
Some of them were for getting more detailed information about the Moon prior to sending the Apollo missions there. But most of them were general solar system exploration.
> That's like saying Starliner's Demo flights don't count as human-rated because they were uncrewed.
No, it isn't. The counterpart in the 1960s to these missions would be the uncrewed flights of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo spacecraft that were done prior to the first crewed missions. I did not include those in the unmanned missions I listed.
