Comment Re:Me depressed now (Score 2) 56
But at its heart it's the result of the dramatic slashing of the NASA budget after Apollo, the end of the "space race," and constant political interference (mostly in the form of pork projects that Congressmen wanted NASA to lend credibility to).
Well, no. Not really.
Pretty much all of the Saturn V pads and buildings are still there, and still in use - having been repurposed multiple times. The Saturn I pads were abandoned in the late 60's because nobody thought we'd ever use them again. (And then along came Skylab.)
Other pads were abandoned for a wide variety of reasons... For example, we don't need as many as we used to because we don't have vehicles sitting on the pad as long as we used to. Others were abandoned because rockets don't blow up nearly as often, so we don't need "hot spares". Others were abandoned because the booster was replaced by a different one and the activity shifted to a different pad. Yet others because not only do rockets not blow up so often, their payloads fail less often and have a longer lifetime, so we don't need much of the the frenetic launch pace of the 60's. (Or multiple combinations of these.) Etc... etc...
The number of pads required aren't pushed by raw budget, they're pulled by user requirements. Now, I won't disagree that budgets effect the pull rate, but so do a variety of other factors.