Thanks to the tremendous technological advances over the past 44 years, NASA is currently pulling 40-yr-old rocket motors out of mothballs in hopes of duplicating that magnificent accomplishment ... sometime. Maybe.
That's what government does. They use printed and/or stolen money to vacuum up a bunch of talent from the private sector to build something cool which they can never again duplicate because the bureaucracy that forms around the project is incapable of doing anything except perpetuating itself.
At best you can get one generation of decent output from a government program while the original innovators are still around. Once they leave the rot takes over very quickly.
Agree in general, though Von Braun himself wasn't in the private sector. All of his work was sponsored by the Nazis directly. With all the nationalistic fanfare surrounding the moonshot, the man directly responsible for putting us there is an SS major, and the engines that got us there are directly descended from V-2.
