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But the reasons Nasa had to do it that way - weren't Space-X has a single goal - lift 1000Kg up 500km cheaply. The space shuttle had a million competing goals
by excuse-me 15y ago
But the reasons Nasa had to do it that way - weren't
Space-X has a single goal - lift 1000Kg up 500km cheaply.
The space shuttle had a million competing goals - from the airforce who wanted a certain glide slope, senators that wanted bits built in their home state, Presidents that wanted a launch on the day of a press conference, scientists that wanted a platform for different experiments, Astronauts that wanted justification for crewed vessels. And of course Nasa that needed to find budgets to keep 'N' Apollo era people employed.
- larrys 15y agoGood points. Space-X while super impressive is like Jet Blue or Southwest vs. a legacy airline with legacy costs and a wide territory they serve.
- toomuchtodo 15y agoActually, that's a beautiful comparison.
- excuse-me 15y agoWorse, Nasa is like the state airline of a communist country. It not only has to fly different obsolete aircraft. It has to fly it's biggest most expensive ones empty to a distant foreign country because of 'political links', it has to fly uneconomic routes to distant outposts, it can never fire anyone, it has to keep large fleets on standby for vague secret military purposes, it has to show huge losses on projects to hide military black-projects or subsidies to commercial aircraft makers. And that's just assuming Nasa is otherwise perfectly competent and efficent. No I'm not bitter - I jut worked on Hubble for a Nasa 'partner'.
- dkokelley 15y ago> it has to keep large fleets on standby for vague secret military purposes, it has to show huge losses on projects to hide military black-projects Please elaborate. What are your sources for this?
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- Loic 15y agoNot fully, you need to add that the legacy airline is funding Jet Blue. Elon Musk explicitly said SpaceX would have not been able to achieve its goals so fast and so cheaply without the access to all the data from NASA. Basically, SpaceX was able to "ride" on the prior work of NASA, while having funding from the NASA. It is more a bit of a mixed spin-off/independent company in this case.
- gaius 15y agoRight, but that work is "owned" by the American taxpayer already. Why shouldn't SpaceX have access to it?
- excuse-me 15y agoIf it wants to know how to build rockets it should go and capture it's own Nazi scientists like we had to.
- adiM 15y agoI think that the more important question is, when another company wants to do space exploration in the future, will they also get access to NASA's expertise? Otherwise, the taxpayer's money has been used to create a barrier to entry for the (future) competition.
- excuse-me 15y agoSo anybody who attempts to use orbit owes Trinity College a few quid !
- nknight 15y agoMost of the information is technically available to the public. Some is already online, some is available for the asking. Some is probably classified (I'd be surprised if SpaceX was given much if any of this), and a lot of it almost certainly is under legal restrictions regarding transfer to non-US entities, but that is a limited barrier to an American company that, of necessity, would have hundreds of millions of dollars in funding.
- 15y ago
- tjic 15y ago> The space shuttle had a million competing goals - from the airforce who wanted a certain glide slope You missed the one goal that was in the forefront of all others: Justify a large budget / keep the permanent bureaucracy employed. Elon doesn't care about this. In the government sector labor force size is a BENEFIT. In the private sector it's a COST. That is why private sectors of the economy deliver more and more value relative to the number of people employed over time (farming, publishing, software, hardware) and why government dominated sectors move in the opposite direction (the only sectors to gain headcount in the recession are education, healthcare, and government).
- Klinky 15y agoI hope you don't really view the world in a black & white narrative pitting the evil bloated government against sprightly nimble innovative companies. Bureaucracy, bloat, waste & failure exists in both the public & private sector. Heck a lot of people are driven to startups because of the dysfunction they've found in other private sector jobs. It's also silly to think this way when you realize that most large government programs involve private contractors doing some, most or all of the actual work. As far as delivering more value, a lot of economies of scale are thanks to technological advances. A lot of technological advances can be credited to expensive governmental programs that were springboards the private sector was later able to launch off of.
- tjic 15y ago> I hope you don't really view the world in a black & white narrative pitting the evil bloated government against sprightly nimble innovative companies. You read a WHOLE lot in there. Look at the point that I actually made, and JUST that point: In Government, headcount is a (political, organization, etc.) benefit. In industry it is a cost.
- excuse-me 15y ago>In industry it is a cost. It's a cost to the shareholder. To every layer of management from the shopfloor foreman to the board it's a benefit.
- gaius 15y agoRight, but all you are really saying there is "NASA would be cheaper if it was better at project management" which is tautological.
- excuse-me 15y agoNo I'm saying that if Nasa had been told - get cargo to orbit cheaply it could (perhaps) have done so. Instead Nasa was told - get a man to the moon before the decade is out. But it was also told build something in Houston to keep senator X happy; stick a few $Billion to Boeing they are having a hard time; keep a few SR-71s flying in case we have another war in the gulf; make sure the Shuttle can get to a polar orbit from Edwards without overflying foreign territory; buy the mirror from P-E because we need to keep Keyhole alive till the next funding cycle. And a hundred other 'tasks' And that's before the inevitable internal bureaucracy kicks in