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>But, the logic behind "many long-shot bets in parallel" is inherently more difficult to explain in the political arena, which is why I think VC may actually be
by buzzkillington 7y ago
>But, the logic behind "many long-shot bets in parallel" is inherently more difficult to explain in the political arena, which is why I think VC may actually be better at some of these kinds of things.
VC backed rockets have already taken longer to take a human to orbit than government money took to take a human to the moon. This is on top of the fact that they have had 60 years of technological improvement.
Simply put VC and capitalism in general is great for giving you turds rolled in glitter, less for building the sewage system to flush the turds out.
- lmm 7y agoThe amount of money matters too. I'm sure if we were willing to plough 5% of the US budget into the VC approach we'd see bigger results.
- buzzkillington 7y agoIt took 5 years to go from the creation of Nasa to a manned Mercury-Atlas. We still haven't seen any of the space startups match a manned Mercury-Redsone, which took 3 years. During the Mercury program Nasa was using on average 0.4% of the federal budget, which was little over 2 billion a year in 2020 dollars. The big spending was on the Apollo missions which are pipe dreams for any of the current space startups 15 years after their foundation.
- TuringNYC 7y agoYou are comparing a different time in the US to now. I dont think this is a fair comparison, everything takes longer now -- buildings, bridges, tunnels. I'm amazed to hear how quickly subways in NYC were built -- these days it takes a decade to build a handful of stops. I dont think it has to do with startups vs not.
- jwatte 7y agoThe safety culture and degree of acceptable risk is somewhat different now, from when we were sure we'd get nuked by the Russians in a month. (And also still thought smoking was healthy.)