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The downside to keeping skilled labour 'hot' are many. First of all, if you have skilled labor, instead of of keeping them 'hot' actually 'eat' them. Ok, the an

The downside to keeping skilled labour 'hot' are many. First of all, if you have skilled labor, instead of of keeping them 'hot' actually 'eat' them. Ok, the analogy breaks down. But why keep them 'hot' just have them build actually useful stuff instead. Its not like there is a lack of useful things they could be doing. And second giving people bullshit useless projects like SLS, does not actually keep them 'hot'. Its more like warmed up Pizza. The people and more importantly organization lose the actual ability to do things quickly at reasonable prices. Somehow it seems acceptable that SLS will cost more then 30 billion $ in development cost and 2-4 more billion $ per launch. Not to mention the time. Don't misunderstand political pork as actually strategic workforce development or long term government policy. That just what you personally wish it to be, not what it actually is.

skummetmaelk 2y ago
Which other useful things can they do? Spend their lives building advertising services or playing zero-sum games in financial markets?
- panick21_ 2y ago
  The whole time when SpaceX didn't exist and NASA invested money in nonsense they could have invented reusable rockets, LEO constellations, nuclear reactors the list goes on. I really don't have a clue what your issue is. There is literally no problem with not having enough ideas that are cool that NASA can work on.
- thmsths 2y ago
  Building rockets and probes for a reasonable price and in a reasonable amount of time. SLS was initially billed as "a simple project to reuse a bunch of parts from the Space Shuttle" and yet it's over a decade old, 20 billions in cost and has not launched even once. So we get no real innovation (as I said previously it's just reusing fairly old technologies), it's not cheap and it's not fast. As for keeping the specialists hot; surely there are better ways to do it. It feels like saying let's keep digging ditches and filling them back up to keep our ditch diggers in shape.
  - xattt 2y ago
    This is essentially why roads are full of potholes.
    - panick21_ 2y ago
      No it isn't. The roads are full of plotholes because of totally broken local accounting, zoning and tax laws. Go read some 'Strong Towns' stuff if you want to know why roads have potholes.

skummetmaelk 2y ago

Which other useful things can they do? Spend their lives building advertising services or playing zero-sum games in financial markets?

panick21_ 2y ago
The whole time when SpaceX didn't exist and NASA invested money in nonsense they could have invented reusable rockets, LEO constellations, nuclear reactors the list goes on. I really don't have a clue what your issue is. There is literally no problem with not having enough ideas that are cool that NASA can work on.
thmsths 2y ago
Building rockets and probes for a reasonable price and in a reasonable amount of time. SLS was initially billed as "a simple project to reuse a bunch of parts from the Space Shuttle" and yet it's over a decade old, 20 billions in cost and has not launched even once. So we get no real innovation (as I said previously it's just reusing fairly old technologies), it's not cheap and it's not fast. As for keeping the specialists hot; surely there are better ways to do it. It feels like saying let's keep digging ditches and filling them back up to keep our ditch diggers in shape.
- xattt 2y ago
  This is essentially why roads are full of potholes.
  - panick21_ 2y ago
    No it isn't. The roads are full of plotholes because of totally broken local accounting, zoning and tax laws. Go read some 'Strong Towns' stuff if you want to know why roads have potholes.