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Not quite, as ULA was also operating under capitalism, yet clearly cared not a whit for minimizing the government's resources. Non-monopolistic capitalism is
by Naritai 9y ago
Not quite, as ULA was also operating under capitalism, yet clearly cared not a whit for minimizing the government's resources. Non-monopolistic capitalism is a closer description.
- Scramblejams 9y agoTo be fair, their customer was always going to be price insensitive. When you're lofting a $2 billion recon satellite, there's no room for error and they don't care if the launch costs $100 million or $300 million -- they just want absolute assurance that it's going to work. So the incentives to minimize resource use weren't there for a very rational reason.
- Naritai 9y agoYeah but, not unlike in the car industry, reliability is a 'good enough' metric for many purchasers. That is to say, beyond some minimum assurance of execution, further improvments in that metric do not further improve the probability that the customer will choose that product over its competitors. So they're only price insensitive up to a point.