Elon Musk's rocket blows up, he shrugs, learns, rolls another one to the launch pad and tries again; our military no longer does that

1st U.S. satellite attempt fails Dec. 6, 1957. The highly successful Vanguard 1 was launched March 17, 1958

Bureaucrats are suffocating military R&D

That’s according to the second-ranked general in the U.S. military who, according to The Epoch Times, pointed out to a recent gathering of defense writers that it currently takes four times as long to develop new weapons as it did during the Cold War.

“We can go fast if we want to,” Lt. Gen. John Hyten said. “But the bureaucracy we’ve put in place is just brutal.” Hyten is the outgoing Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

As an example, Hyten said the U.S. first tested a hypersonic missile like that recently disclosed by China in 2010. But risk-averse bureaucrats killed it before it had a chance to go through the research and development process.

“We were developing hypersonics ahead of everybody in the world and the first test failed,” Hyten said. “The first test of everything fails. So the first test fails and we have two years of investigation into why it did fail. Two years. Then we launch again and it fails, and we failed. This time it was two fails and we canceled the program and we stopped.”

Musk’s would-be competitors in the private sector space race like Bezos don’t actually build anything, they just sue Musk. Maybe the Pentagon geniuses will sue China.