What I think is worse is that the country has lost the collective
engineering know-how that built Apollo/Saturn.

That's the nature of space engineering. It's too small of a field to
retain complete capability

Look on the sci.space.* groups at all the people who want to trash NASA
and lay off everyone who works on Shuttle. These people will all find
jobs in other fields, and getting them *back* into space work would be
one hell of a challenge.


I'm worried that the next generation of
space engineers will have to "re-invent the wheel" to accomplish any
big projects.

Yup. Once an entire industry has dried up and blown away, getting it
back means starting from square one.