Developereo
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I fully expected you to bring up von Braun and you did not disappoint. It is the typical response of those who would seek to diminish the main point by pecking at the minutae. The US is a land composed of immigrants and those immigrants, along with their descendants, worked with everyone to produce. You cannot take credit away from the country simply by pointing out the original ethnicities of the people who worked hard to exploit the native resources, natural and human, to create all these technological advances.
A silly attempt to dance around the topic with predictable and irrelevant cliches. These immigrants did not come to the American shores with empty pockets and work their way into the space program. They were grabbed by the US precisely because of their pre-existing knowledge. By your logic, if Pakistan abducted the top NASA scientists and had them develop its space program, then that program would be 'fully indigenous'.
The US Space Shuttle fleet is being retired due to age. Show me a single country that has its replacement. Do not bring up the Russians. They have a working launch method that is iinferior, expendable launch vehicles (ELV) while the Space Shuttle is reusable (RLV). Will Pakistan step up? If we have to regress back to using ELV, and we will have to, it will be because of financial, not technological reasons. Until anyone else can offer a working advancement of the Space Shuttle, an RLV that is both a launch vehicle as well as a functioning space station by itself, the US remain the leader in this aspect of space exploration.
The US is becoming irrelevant in the sense that it's decision to help is no longer necessary. There are other countries, notably France and China, who are more than happy to help countries especially against the US wishes. We are not talking about space shuttles or missions to Saturn. The first step for Pakistan would be a SLV, for which there is plenty of help available. If the US helps, good. If not, it is irrelevant.
Of course, you can always suck on the intellectual lollipop of focusing on how many non-whites are there in NASA in trying to push US along to our 'irrelevance'.
Spare me your pathetic attempt to turn this into a racial discussion. I have never presented this as a white v/s non-white issue.