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So it's worse than public-private partnerships, because the taxpayer still foots the bill for development but the company reaps all the rewards. Thanks for cla

by clipsy 3y ago

So it's worse than public-private partnerships, because the taxpayer still foots the bill for development but the company reaps all the rewards. Thanks for clarifying, I guess.

chpatrick 3y ago
The advancement of spaceflight technology per taxpayer dollar has been orders of magnitude more with SpaceX than with Boeing or Lockheed Martin, to the benefit of everyone.
pixl97 3y ago
You'd think it's worse, but at the end of the day it's not. Just look at SpaceX blowing up rockets. You get some news about "Musks toy exploded, he'll never accomplish anything" and that's most of the story. Now, when NASA's rocket explodes people get drug in front of congress and asked 50,000 questions about why their tax payer dollars are exploding while the science guy tries to explain that's what a prototype does.
dotnet00 3y ago
It's not worse, that can only be a bad faith interpretation of what I described. It's like arguing that if the government decides it needs more pens and decides to purchase them, causing a pen manufacturer to be able to expand their operation, the public has lost because instead the government should've put the far higher effort required into becoming a pen manufacturer themselves. Since it apparently wasn't clear, in this model, NASA pays as a customer, everyone tolerates higher risk of failure, company gets to own and sell its product and NASA ideally gets to buy future rides on the product too. This "private" model allows NASA to cause a bunch of companies to develop and attempt to sell competing products, encouraging cost reductions and independent technology development, as is happening in rocketry with SpaceX, RocketLab, Firefly, Relativity etc. In the public-private partnership model, NASA pays much much more money, tolerates zero risk of failure, the company never puts in its own investment and has a guaranteed profit on top of whatever the project costs. On top of that, while the public technically owns the technology, it's ownership without meaning, because it isn't practical to switch to having a different company do manufacturing. Every time NASA wants another unit, they still have to pay the company a large sum of money to build and deliver it. This discourages innovation and encourages cost inflation. It leads to rockets that cost $4B+ per launch, unable to be built at faster than 1 per year, using outdated technology.

by clipsy 3y ago

So it's worse than public-private partnerships, because the taxpayer still foots the bill for development but the company reaps all the rewards. Thanks for clarifying, I guess.

chpatrick 3y ago

The advancement of spaceflight technology per taxpayer dollar has been orders of magnitude more with SpaceX than with Boeing or Lockheed Martin, to the benefit of everyone.

pixl97 3y ago

You'd think it's worse, but at the end of the day it's not. Just look at SpaceX blowing up rockets. You get some news about "Musks toy exploded, he'll never accomplish anything" and that's most of the story. Now, when NASA's rocket explodes people get drug in front of congress and asked 50,000 questions about why their tax payer dollars are exploding while the science guy tries to explain that's what a prototype does.

dotnet00 3y ago

It's not worse, that can only be a bad faith interpretation of what I described. It's like arguing that if the government decides it needs more pens and decides to purchase them, causing a pen manufacturer to be able to expand their operation, the public has lost because instead the government should've put the far higher effort required into becoming a pen manufacturer themselves. Since it apparently wasn't clear, in this model, NASA pays as a customer, everyone tolerates higher risk of failure, company gets to own and sell its product and NASA ideally gets to buy future rides on the product too. This "private" model allows NASA to cause a bunch of companies to develop and attempt to sell competing products, encouraging cost reductions and independent technology development, as is happening in rocketry with SpaceX, RocketLab, Firefly, Relativity etc. In the public-private partnership model, NASA pays much much more money, tolerates zero risk of failure, the company never puts in its own investment and has a guaranteed profit on top of whatever the project costs. On top of that, while the public technically owns the technology, it's ownership without meaning, because it isn't practical to switch to having a different company do manufacturing. Every time NASA wants another unit, they still have to pay the company a large sum of money to build and deliver it. This discourages innovation and encourages cost inflation. It leads to rockets that cost $4B+ per launch, unable to be built at faster than 1 per year, using outdated technology.