The STS famously had all sorts of contradictory goals (some came from outside NASA) that resulted in sub-optimal design tradeoffs--which in turn required the highest-performance engines NASA could get their hands on.
From the outside, looking back, it seems like the Space Shuttle was so (unexpectedly) demanding that it basically took over NASA for 25 years. Maybe there just weren't enough resources to pursue other launch vehicle ideas, even if people there recognized the need.
The days up to and including the Apollo missions were the US's glory days; all the great innovation in rocketry was happening then, and it culminated in the Saturn V, which was a big success (esp. considering the level of overall technology back then, and what they were trying to do). And, as you pointed out, it used kerosene. It still remains (I'm pretty sure) the largest and heaviest-lift launch vehicle in all of human history. We still haven't surpassed it, and it was designed in the 1960s.
What have we done since the Apollo program was canceled early? Nothing as notable. A bunch of really expensive launches to LEO with an overpriced space-going pickup truck basically. And a bunch of small launches (satellites, probes, etc.) using rockets that were designed way back then for launching nuclear weapons. We're still highly dependent on rocket engines built by Russia. The whole Space Shuttle idea itself was stupid: the costs and complexity were huge because of the idiotic requirement of being able to retrieve military satellites from orbit and bring them back intact and in secret. If it weren't for that, they never would have come up with such an absurd design, and would have just stuck with much cheaper capsules like the Soyuz and the upcoming manned vehicles by the US.
ISS? Hubble? Various Mars rovers?
Sure they aren't as notable as putting humans on the freaking moon, but that's also a pretty impossibly high bar to match. The only thing that would best it is humans on Mars.
> We're still highly dependent on rocket engines built by Russia.
That's not entirely true. The Soyuz-U does have by far the most launches of any system at 771, true. But the still successful Atlas II (63 launches and also the most reliable system to date) used all Rocketdyne engines. The newer Atlas V does use a Russian engine for the first stage but Rocketdyne for the second.
The Delta IV is also all Rocketdyne. It's also entirely LH2/LOX and yet weighs less than the Falcon 9.
As I said before, nothing as notable.
>Sure they aren't as notable as putting humans on the freaking moon
And it seems you agree with me!!
>but that's also a pretty impossibly high bar to match. The only thing that would best it is humans on Mars.
Wrong, there's plenty of things that would best Apollo. A serious space station (like the rotating one in 2001) perhaps at a Lagrangian point, a Moon base, Moon or asteroid mining operations, orbital construction of a longer-range spacecraft, creation of nuclear spacecraft engines, etc. Basically all the stuff we dreamed about back in the Apollo days and then never bothered to do and just forgot about.
Their robotic missions have been hugely successful.
Consider just the number of them: Viking, Voyager, Galileo, Deep Space, Cassini, New Horizons, Dawn, Kepler, and Juno. That's not even counting our many Mars probes. It's pretty impressive to launch a new interplanetary probe that frequently, and every one of them accomplished its mission.
We have now sent probes to every planet in the Solar System, two dwarf planets, asteroids, and comets. If we are still in an era where crewed interplanetary travel is impractical, we're making the most of it with these uncrewed missions.
Probes are nice for science, but they really don't inspire people the way manned flights, space stations, etc. do. Nor do they require nearly as many resources; they comparatively cheap and simple. The resources poured into Apollo were enormous, and the technologies derived were hugely significant. What technologies were derived from New Horizons? Probably none. I'm not saying it shouldn't have been launched; it was absolutely a worthy project. But it just doesn't compare to Apollo in any way. So as I said before: "nothing as notable".
What do you mean by this? The Mercury Atlas launch vehicle used kerosene / LOX in its first stage. The Saturn V used kerosene / LOX in its first stage and LOX / LH2 in subsequent stages.
Also, for the majority of spaceflight, both manned and unmanned, "US rocket scientists" were the government, right? Especially after WWII.