this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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Another reason to stop letting private enterprise determine the future of spaceflight.
This was always the plan. Back during DAC 2 kickoff meetings for what became the HLS “government reference design”, folks were struggling to figure out how to get back by 2028.
The press conference where Pence said “2024” happened in the middle of those meetings. Shifting to the private model also shifted the inevitable failure to meet that 2024 date off of NASA (who was/is still wiping SLS egg off it’s face) and onto the “service provider”.
With Trump, there was a mandate to do a moon thing before the 2024 election. With Biden, that schedule pressure is gone… so my personal guess on a crewed lunar surface flight is back to 2028. This is a good thing; 2024 was not enough time.
This seems to me to be more more of a case of Hofstadter's law. Cost-plus contracts don’t seem to have any better track record than fixed-price contracts. For example, JWST was delayed several times, and SLS was originally mandated to launch in 2016, 6 years before the actual first launch date. Starship does not meet the ambitious internal schedule of SpaceX, but the speed of development is still impressive to most other space-related projects.
I think folks are focusing on the wrong thing. Both cost-plus and fixed-price contracts can succeed or fail. Cost-plus fails on budget. Both can fail on schedule (see both SLS and Starliner). If budget can’t move, though, fixed-price can fail on either technical (couldn’t deliver all features for the fixed price) or on risk (tried too many untested things to force the design into the cost box).
What SpaceX agreed to do was to take any cost hit against their own internal budget instead of NASA’s. That kind of power play is only available to very wealthy companies or to companies with bankruptcy lawyers on perpetual standby. It doesn’t build a sustainable space industry… it just allows a bunch of billionaires to enter the market by putting their fortunes up as collateral… which they could have done under a cost-plus model too.
The big upside for the private companies is that they don’t have to share the IP with the American people or with other companies. The result is that every significant difference in competing products (Starship vs Blue) will have to be hashed out in the marketplace in order to arrive at a standard… but with only two entrants, one customer, and a transaction every 18 months, the invisible hand of the market is going to take a VERY LONG TIME to find the most efficient solution.
All of the contract mechanisms suck for different reasons. SLS shows worst-case cost-plus… took forever and was stupid expensive but mostly worked. Starliner shows a worse-case for fixed-price… still taking forever, the company would be bankrupt fixing their problems if it wasn’t the size of Boeing, notably doesn’t work. The discriminating factor is what the American people get for the money. We own SLS, for all the good that’ll do us. For Starship, we paid into the pot, but not enough to get an ownership stake… so that money is just gone.
Cost plus is only defensible if the goal is short-term and all-important. If an asteroid were barreling towards Earth, yeah, sure, throw a trillion dollars at it.
An open-ended goal of expanding the scope of human endeavor in space (and this landing is just a manifestation of the bigger goal) requires building an efficient industry around the goal. To that end cost-plus must go.
Cost plus doesn’t make things go faster. The only thing that makes contracts go faster is an award for early delivery, and you can do that with any procurement vehicle. Cost-plus is for when you don’t know what you need. Fixed cost is for when you do. Fixed cost is going to kill you in change fees if you’re wrong, cost-plus will kill you in a bunch of other fees. All tools are useful.
All comes down to economics at the end of the day. Public sector projects cost so much more than the private sector. Just look at the SLS cost vs Falcon heavy for example. And no part of SLS is reusable!
i'm not gonna lie: i have yet to hear a compelling argument for why anyone should care about this when the cost is being assumed by one of the richest and unambiguously the most powerful government in the world, and possibly in human history. i guess it's theoretically cool that Elon can build a thing for cheaper than the government can, but he has a profit incentive for doing that, which probably shouldn't be a variable influencing the construction of any vehicle that is highly liable to kill all its occupants if anything goes wrong.
I'm not even positive that part is really true. I mean the cost to the government is lower, but SpaceX is spending billions of dollars a year. We don't really know what starship or their lander costs them to make. All these Musk fans always talk about how much cheaper it is, but I'd like to see the numbers.
I guess what I would look at is is the ability to have more space projects ongoing at once. NASA has a limited budget every year, and while it is possible for Congress to allocate a much larger percentage to them, that currently isn’t the reality. So instead of NASA managing a space station which eats up a larger percentage of their budget, a private enterprise can operate a space station (yes, with a profit motive), which frees up NASA budget to perform more missions which have at the moment only scientific value, ex probes and landers to outer solar system planets.
i mean personally? that's a tradeoff i'll make every day. the idea of ceding our last great frontier to dipshits who want to privatize access to it and close it as a common good before we even mature into a space-faring civilization is at its face unfathomable and immoral to me. i would so rather NASA do less than give even an inch of our long-term space ambitions over to private corporations.
It what way do you think the privatization has been bad so far, or could become bad soon?
3 examples that I think are positive: Crew Dragon being commercial allowed the permanent ISS crew size to go up to 7 and allow private free-flyers and ISS missions. Starship has at least 3 tourist flights booked. Among the private space stations coming soon, VAST is making something like a space RV on their own.
I don't see how any of those private activities hurt in any way.
by being private in the first place. necessarily, private corporations do not have the interests of humanity in mind, they are obliged and gladly prioritize money. simply put: i will never trust a private corporation to do the right thing if it has a profit incentive to do otherwise, because corporations are not benevolent or altruistic entities and never will be. anything they do which can be ascribed as either label should be understood as either coincidental or an intentional and cynical play to keep scrutiny and regulation off of their back. these statements i think are especially applicable to space travel.
Frankly, neither do public endeavors. Public endeavors have the interests of the politicians first and foremost, and NASA funding is, for all practical purposes, another pork program intended to draw in votes in Florida and Texas, with any gains for humanity as a side effect. In the past 50 years this model has failed to deliver improved access to space. SpaceX has managed to reduce costs (and, by extension, increase accessibility) by a hundred fold. I know everyone hates Musk, and he is well and truly an asshole, but the current space renaissance is due to SpaceX.
"The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies." -Noam Chomsky
Do you have another suggestion ? Target than doing a public-private partnership what should NASA do ?