3 ms·
The shuttle program had several problems, but perhaps the biggest was something of a "design by committee" issue. Too many interested parties wanted it to do to
by jwells89 2y ago
The shuttle program had several problems, but perhaps the biggest was something of a "design by committee" issue. Too many interested parties wanted it to do too many things, making it somewhere between bad and mediocre at all of them, to say nothing of the costs.
To build reliable, economical rockets and spacecraft (at least those burdened with the task of escaping Earth's gravity well), you need to be able to intensely specialize and streamline them to the greatest degree possible, with what complexity remains pulling its own weight several times over. They need to be really good at one thing, with any other use cases coming as a bonus.
- pfdietz 2y agoThat's not even the root cause. The need for so many parties came from the need for a large enough market to justify the program. And the need for a large market came from the large cost of developing the launcher. And that came from the top down decision for reusability combined with overall inefficiency of the NASA-industry development system. And that is sourced back to Congress viewing NASA and space spending primarily as a pork delivery vehicle, not as an effort intended to achieve real results as economically as possible. It took SpaceX to slash costs, accelerate development, and choose an approach that really made engineering success to push partial reusability over the finish line. SpaceX was not subject to the perverse incentives under which NASA is forced to operate.