At least the Soviets came to the correct conclusion after flying the Buran once. "This thing is extremely expensive, dangerous, and doesn't do anything cheaper rockets couldn't do better." America stuck with the Space Shuttle for thirty years, and would have been far better off putting that money into building on Apollo tech instead.

But yeah the infighting wasn't great and occasionally lead to disaster as the different branches tried to one-up each other. And the fact that Soviet engineers had to sell their rockets to the higher-ups by playing up their military applications is an unfortunate echo of the ties between NASA and the American military-industrial complex.