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this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2024
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Maybe NASA would have bothered if its funding hadn't been cut again and again and again...
I actually prefer NASA to focus on science engineering. There's a need for private launch capabilities anyway and this way NASA can focus on what they do best.
What’s the need for private launch capabilities? Private = capitalist. I don’t see much good in capitalist ventures.
Because there's a need for private satellites? Should NASA use limited resources for that?
The airspace is a public asset though. Letting capitalists exploit it for profit isn’t going to end well, if the rest of the environment is anything to go by.
NASA farms these out to outside companies to build anyway, as seen with the latest Boeing space fiasco, so I don't necessarily believe this to be true. These defense contractors seem to be interested in little more than milking the US government for all they're worth.
Sure, because they don't have any budget themselves...
They have a $25B yearly budget.
What is SpaceX spending on R&D? From what I've read, Starship is estimated to cost $10B for development and their R&D budget for 2023 was $1.5B. If NASA was going to build something similar themselves, they've had nearly 70 years and hundreds of billions to accomplish it.
In reality their budget goes toward companies like Boeing, Northrop Grummon, and Lockheed Martin, who then pocket it and build substandard equipment. This is all public information so I can't imagine why people are downvoting other than being extremely emotional for some inexplicable reason.
NASA doesn't have effective control of their budget anymore. Congress holds the purse strings and uses them like a harness
NASA gets funding to do something - like go to the moon, or track CO2 emissions. But it comes with strings - sometimes you have to build a certain component in a certain congressional district, sometimes Congress chooses the design you have to use
It's a problem of politics and corruption. When the public supports NASA, they have more autonomy. When NASA gets a blank check, they do more with it - reusable rockets aren't a new idea, and when they cancelled the shuttle program NASA had brain drain. Some of those people founded spaceX - Elon didn't start it, he came in when they were getting off the ground, just like with Tesla
From wikipedia:
So your claim that
conflicts with wikipedia’s history of the company.
You are omitting the lede. Public appetite for failure on tax payer funds is near zero. That increases time, complexity, and cost for launches (with or without humans aboard).
Which can be a failure in itself when you spend 10 years and tens of billions building something "perfectly" only for it to break on its maiden voyage. That makes you wonder what was the point of doing everything so methodically when they could have taken a more efficient and iterative approach.
I'm not saying it's a good system, but one that exists due to the nature of the funding. Those external pressures (especially when it gets political) just don't allow for the same amount of mistakes.
Remember, SpaceX was one failed launch away from bankruptcy.
What spacecraft do you think they built themselves, without big contractors doing mos5 of the work...?
SpaceX broke the decades-long practice of costs-plus contracts for lump sum contracts from DOD. DOD wanted to offer them the same costs-plus contract style they give to other defense contractors and SpaceX turned that down and demanded lump sum on delivery.