Reddit mentions: The best air & space law books

Exactly.

The way I describe SLS is that for a long time, contractors worked to see how much money they could extract out of NASA while building the hardware that NASA would use to do interesting things (Apollo), slightly less interesting things (shuttle), and then mostly mundane (ISS).

Then the contractors realized that the only thing better than getting paid a ton of money to fly was getting paid a ton of money to not fly. Why should Boeing work hard to get SLS functional? It actually makes their work harder than continuing the delays, and it's not like being slow or making big mistake has cost them when it comes to incentives.

Have you read Simberg's "Safe is not an option"? It's a great discussion about taking risks when it's useful to do so, and not taking risks when you aren't doing anything interesting...

https://www.amazon.com/Safe-Not-Option-Rand-Simberg/dp/0989135519

Commercial Crew's problems are primarily down to NASA's fear and Congress not funding it properly. The technical issues were never the hardest part. SpaceX could have flown people on the original Dragon capsule, but for NASA. For an excellent look at how NASA has hampered rather than enabled space exploration, settlement, and more, I highly recommend Safe Is Not An Option.

...the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age by Walter Mcdougall is a solid work on spaceflight and how it came to be, but it's prett heavy if you don't know much about the subject.

Also, Crowded Orbits: Conflict and Cooperation in Space by James Clay Moltz can be used as a primer on Space exploration and policy. It is more focused on the 21st century use of space, but he explains very well how the beginning of the space age still affects the way space is being used today.

My third suggestion is a more basic and simple approach, Space Exploratiom for Dummies will take you through a quick history of each space program.

Read on!

I dont advice you to use this, the art is copyrighted https://www.amazon.com/Kids-Books-Adventure-adventure-pirates-ebook/dp/B01CNVP4FY

That's the premise of Rand Simberg in his book Safe Is Not An Option.

In a trial and error learning process we will make mistakes and there will be loss of property and possibly life. If we can't accept that, we're done -- some will argue.

I partially agree. I think focusing on improving the robotic state of the art and robotically establishing infrastructure on other bodies can largely mitigate risk to human life. But you will still lose expensive payloads in a trial and error process.