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I’m on the same page as Garver on space policy, but I suspect she is wrong about NASA’s (and the Air Force’s) motivation for declining. Anything that NASA want

I’m on the same page as Garver on space policy, but I suspect she is wrong about NASA’s (and the Air Force’s) motivation for declining. Anything that NASA wants to launch into space is an extremely expensive, one-of-a-kind science instrument that a team has spent years of their time on. It would be highly imprudent to launch something like that on a test mission. No one does that. The usual payload for a first flight is a concrete block or other mass simulator. NASA and the Air Force made the right call in saying no. And Elon made the right call in turning this into a phenomenally inspiring event instead of a boring launch of a concrete block.

dmurray 9y ago
You've got to think there are plenty of scientists at NASA who would jump at an offer like "you have two weeks to put an experiment together for this launch, it can't cost more than $50k and you have to be ok with losing it". Just because NASA normally optimizes for expensive projects with years of design time doesn't mean those are the only possible space projects with scientific value. If NASA declined the spot, it's a failure of bureaucracy, not of scientific imagination. Launching a car is still great though. Scientific data isn't the only possible benefit from a space mission.