> How so? Surely if NASA can do something cheaper it should have more money to do other things or find it easier to get money for more things? This touches on

> How so? Surely if NASA can do something cheaper it should have more money to do other things or find it easier to get money for more things? This touches on an important question in economics. When you take your 101 class, if you pay attention, you will see that there is no role for competition at all. The whole economy could be a single firm, and all the prices and quantities would be the same, because the firm drives down economic profit to zero on the marginal good as a result of maximizing their producer surplus all by itself. This comes from optimization of convex functions - with appropriate convexity assumptions, any economic profit is money left on the table for the firm because it would just produce more and sell more units up until the last unit sold would earn zero profits. What this means is that there is usually not a difference between a planned economy managed by a social planner and a free market economy (there are some differences with more exotic models, but this isn't important here). That is the observation you are using. This led economists to investigate what the difference would be, and one group focused on non-convexities, a small group jumped into the rabbit hole of disequilibrium economics, while another group -- the Austrians -- insisted it was lack of price information that thwarted the social planner. If everything was auctioned off and every task given a budget with a maximization goal, we would discover prices but administrative processes would not discover prices. But what I believe is that many organizations are just bad actors -- they leave money on the table, both in the free market and in an administrative setting. What you need is competition to drive out bad actors. People do not act in their self-interest nearly as much as models predict -- they have to basically be forced into it with competition. The first inkling I had of this was landlords in San Francisco letting their properties rot via water damage because they couldn't be bothered to fix the windows. Why would they commit economic sabotage? Because they could afford to lose the money and still make enough to meet their needs. And for others, it was just that they were bad at their job, but rising property prices/rents meant they would not be driven out of business. This is why monopolies suck so much -- there is no mechanism to get rid of those who are bad at their job, even the job of profit maximization. So rather than viewing an organization as maximizing efficiency, maybe view it as "minimizing effort subject to avoiding bankruptcy". Once you adopt that view, you get different answers to questions such as why NASA isn't as efficient as possible (and neither is SpaceX). You are only as efficient as your competitors/shareholders force you to be.