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I think fundamentally, a million dollars a year is just not enough cash for this kind of venture. All hardware is expensive. High performance hardware with an i

I think fundamentally, a million dollars a year is just not enough cash for this kind of venture. All hardware is expensive. High performance hardware with an innate chance of failing (rockets, submarines, airplanes) is even more expense. Sales to the government are expensive and SLOW. If you are doing both gov't + hardware, it's going to take some big bucks for relatively low reward. There is a reason few have really "disrupted" one of the major defense contractors. SpaceX is the closest, but even then, that's only 1 of many different products the major defense contractors are building.

JabavuAdams 13y ago
Yeah. Some amateur rocketeers used to deride Elon Musk for spending more than $100M, claiming he was "old space", not "new space". But maybe, that's just the scale of the problem. I suppose progress depends on the unreasonable man, and all that, but if you're too unreasonable, you just hamstring yourself.
InclinedPlane 13y ago
I disagree, somewhat. A million dollars a year can be a lot of money. But it's very difficult to constantly maintain spending that money in the most efficient way possible. And all it takes is making one big mistake to lock in the development trajectory to a track that is very inefficient and suddenly slows down with the given budget. At that point it becomes very difficult for most organizations to fix things, because it means abandoning work that the team has already planned for, partially completed, made commitments on, and so forth. The only way to get back to the more efficient model is to make a drastic hard-break and abandon a lot of current work. Though it might be very non-trivial to recover the state of development back to a previous point. Such an effort is also likely to be very demoralizing as well. The trick is to have someone in a position of power making sure that such "trajectory excursions" either never happen or are easily recoverable from.

JabavuAdams 13y ago

Yeah. Some amateur rocketeers used to deride Elon Musk for spending more than $100M, claiming he was "old space", not "new space". But maybe, that's just the scale of the problem. I suppose progress depends on the unreasonable man, and all that, but if you're too unreasonable, you just hamstring yourself.

InclinedPlane 13y ago

I disagree, somewhat. A million dollars a year can be a lot of money. But it's very difficult to constantly maintain spending that money in the most efficient way possible. And all it takes is making one big mistake to lock in the development trajectory to a track that is very inefficient and suddenly slows down with the given budget. At that point it becomes very difficult for most organizations to fix things, because it means abandoning work that the team has already planned for, partially completed, made commitments on, and so forth. The only way to get back to the more efficient model is to make a drastic hard-break and abandon a lot of current work. Though it might be very non-trivial to recover the state of development back to a previous point. Such an effort is also likely to be very demoralizing as well. The trick is to have someone in a position of power making sure that such "trajectory excursions" either never happen or are easily recoverable from.