I went to a wedding in Texas this weekend. We had a free day Sunday and toured the Johnson Space Center. Other than the few people in Mission Control the place was deserted. I was last there in 1970, and even though I was very young then, the atmosphere was totally different. The Johnson Space Center is a decaying museum of what was once American technical prowess.
I remember how forlorn Huntsville was in the later 1970s; and the only people I saw at the Cape were tourists.
Sounds like the cape. One guy I know who still works out there refers to it as the Kennedy Space Museum. We’ve outsourced our own access to space. The main reason we probably even have funding going to SpaceX is because its CEO was a major donor to Obama (aka, crony capitalism). IMHO, if it were not for that, Obama probably would have canned the whole COTS program at the same time he canned Constellation. It’s really quite depressing.