While it's interesting to speculate about how the mistakes of the past could have been avoided, it should be noted that a major flaw was always over looked. In each of these scenarios the effort was to "fix NASA" by providing an alternate decision. The result however would always result in exactly the situation we have today, NASA as America's State Airline for Space. We would still have a future limited to what Congress would have funded for NASA. Indeed a more efficient, more reliable, more entrenched NASA would make the development of a commercial launch industry even more difficult than it is today. A far better scenario would have been for NASA to have gotten out of the space launch business the second Neil Armstrong's foot hit the Lunar soil. We know how far NASA has not taken us into space since Apollo, we do not know how far free enterprise would have taken us.