DID NASA DECLINE because of diversity? And was Silicon Valley built by white NASA rejects?

The agency was a persistent target of civil rights activism from the very beginning. Apparently, even President Kennedy attempted to smooth the way for a black pilot named Ed Dwight to join the moon landing mission despite a lack of qualifications, with the motive being to sway the black community and solidify their loyalty to the Democratic party. . . .

By 1976, NASA had instituted an entirely new method for selecting astronauts to ensure greater representation, on threat from a lawsuit ginned up by the black lady from Star Trek.

Not so oddly enough, this was a similar time period during which power was beginning to transition to Silicon Valley, and its unprincipled exceptions of filtering employees by proxy IQ tests. Microsoft was founded in 1975, at the same time as the capable were being told they were no longer wanted in the government.

The reason why this story doesn’t get told too often should be clear: after the calls for increased diversity, NASA built a useless shuttle full of unqualified astronauts that kept exploding on television instead of colonizing Mars.