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I don't think money is the issue. NASA has a much larger budget than SpaceX, courtesy of taxpayers. But NASA is a government agency, with more red tape and bure
by HenryKissinger 7y ago
I don't think money is the issue. NASA has a much larger budget than SpaceX, courtesy of taxpayers. But NASA is a government agency, with more red tape and bureaucracy than necessary. SpaceX doesn't have to go through a 6 months approval process to order a part.
SpaceX also benefits from a constant, unbroken vision: develop cheap, reusable rockets -> lower launch costs -> build a spaceship to go to Mars. That's roughly the plan, and they've stuck to it since their founding. NASA, meanwhile, sees every new administration flip the table and change the mission, because every president wants to have their Kennedy "We choose to go to the Moon" moment". This makes long term planning impossible, and budgets are cut when Congress gets impatient.
NASA is still riding on the coattails of the Apollo program, but it takes more than that to inspire people to work for you. No doubt that NASA remains a desirable employer full of bright and motivated people eager to contribute to the larger goal, but NASA just doesn't have this "it" factor anymore. If you asked someone on the street what NASA is doing back in 1970, they would say "send people to the Moon". But today? NASA is involved in a plethora of projects, from the Mars rovers to aeronautics to climate change monitoring, which is nice, to be sure, but also sucks time and resources from the kind of "Moonshot projects" that SpaceX and other private actors are working on.
- octosphere 7y ago> I don't think money is the issue Interesting reading the Wikipedia entry regarding SpaceX's funding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX#Ownership,_funding_and_valuation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX#Ownership,_funding_and_... Seems to be a lot of capital 'raised' which I usually read as money out of thin air, or money otherwise provided because of a certain hype attached to the company.
- CrazyStat 7y agoNASA is basically a jobs program at this point. Congress keeps funding it primarily as a way to direct federal money to certain states. There's no vision. There are lots of good people at NASA and they manage to do some great work, but they could do much more with the budget they have if they weren't subject to the political whims of two branches of government. ESA/Ariane are in a similar situation. They rejected reusable rockets a couple of years ago explicitly because they were afraid of the effect it would have on the jobs on their production line--the calculus is purely political, and jobs won out over not being left behind with an overpriced single-use launch platform. To their credit they recently walked that back and are now developing a reusable launch platform.
- growlist 7y agoHit the nail on the head. If Starship/Superheavy succeeds the contrast will be stark, with the relative inefficiency of ESA/NASA making them look like employment schemes that do space as a side-effect. If they care about remaining relevant in rocketry both organisations need to wake up, smell the coffee and start disrupting themselves before SpaceX becomes the only game in town (ESA efforts notwithstanding). This is very much what I would love to see, it's 2019 and we should have at least a moonbase by now.
- nnain 7y agoSo true, India's ISRO is the only well performing govt agency, and even that's too little compared to SpaceX (considering the budget that's been poured into it for the last 70 yrs). The rest of the govt companies in India couldn't even make a decent aircraft. It's sad to see people join them only to get a 'safe job' and not really to create phenomenal stuff with the massive budget.