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> political in-fighting, fractured organizational structure and lots and lots of red tape. These things happen in private sector organizations too; the assumpt

> political in-fighting, fractured organizational structure and lots and lots of red tape. These things happen in private sector organizations too; the assumption that the private sector somehow will do it better needs to be supported. Really, we need to point to a specific private sector organization. Name every place in the solar system where NASA missions currently are located. Outside the solar system? Where they have gone historically? Their achievements are staggering; history-making events are routine; they are by far the greatest explorers in the history of humanity. Certainly they aren't perfect and every organization can improve, but they do pretty well.

humanrebar 12y ago
> the assumption that the private sector somehow will do it better needs to be supported Well, the assumption is that a healthy private sector can't support itself with coercion(1), so if a private organization fails too much it changes its direction or ceases to exist. Also, you can disrupt private initiative peacefully, but disrupting the government is usually a pretty drastic action that costs a lot of resources, even lives. (1) There are unfair practices in the private sector like monopolies and fraud... which are at least nominally against the rules in liberal democracies. If we allow that the government fails to enforce its rules, I'm not sure why we're confident about its ability to execute in other areas.
- hackuser 12y ago
  > the assumption is that a healthy private sector can't support itself with coercion(1), so if a private organization fails too much it changes its direction or ceases to exist. Also, you can disrupt private initiative peacefully, but disrupting the government is usually a pretty drastic action that costs a lot of resources, even lives. I think it's the opposite: We disrupt government every 2 years by firing various leaders; every 4-8 years we replace the entire executive leadership. If a government leader fails to often, they change their direction (as many politicians do!) or lose their job.
  - humanrebar 12y ago
    > I think it's the opposite: We disrupt government every 2 years by firing various leaders; every 4-8 years we replace the entire executive leadership. I'm not talking about leadership, I'm talking about organization. As in bureaucracies. It's extremely hard for any leader to streamline an organization. It's possible though difficult in a private organization. I'm not familiar with a national government that has, say, dropped its headcount by 50%. If a private organization can't successfully make that sort of change, it gets disrupted eventually. But governments don't get disrupted like that without something drastic happening.
DINKDINK 12y ago
One could make the argument that the organizations that manage their processes with the least amount of in-fighting will be the ones that survive.
sillysaurus3 12y ago
These things happen in private sector organizations too; the assumption that the private sector somehow will do it better needs to be supported. It's the private sector. It does better than the government practically by definition. Sometimes it even does a better job at killing, which is why private contractors exist for warfare, such as Blackwater/Academi. If this wasn't true, then the government wouldn't contract the private sector for various tasks. But it does, all the time, because contracting is far more effective, and results matter. It seems like your view of NASA is rather rose-tinted. Along with the impressive, courageous explorers, there are political opportunists and all of the other drama you'd expect of any large organization. It will be interesting to find out whether the private sector or the public sector reaches Mars first. EDIT: Regarding the political nature of NASA: http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/rogers-commission/Appendix-F.txt http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/roger... That was a different time. In fact, it was an entirely different generation of people. But the important question is, in what ways has NASA changed since then? EDIT 2: So, this is a troll comment, then? I'm becoming a little disenchanted with HN, actually. It's grown large enough that the voting system seems to be becoming less and less relevant. There's a certain effect that you see on Reddit where, if someone disagrees with your point, then they will downvote your comment and every subsequent comment you made, regardless of content. I've noticed the same thing happening here on HN, and it's a very recent phenomenon. I've also observed it happening to others, not just myself. I've restrained myself from talking about it, but I think I'll go ahead and speak up at this point. I'm not sure what to do about this, actually. HN has always been a kind of second home to me, but now it's too large to have meaningful conversations. In order to even get into a position to have a conversation, you have to either be one of the top comments in the thread, or you have to reply to one of the top comments. This is less true than it is for Reddit, but it's definitely happening. The problem is this: Those who are quickest to a thread are usually the ones who will get those top spots, rather than the most reasoned or comprehensive comment. HN has some defenses against this; for example, all comments appear at the top of the thread for a limited time period, and ostensibly the voting system is supposed to keep the good ones there. But HN is growing so massive that those algorithms may need some tweaking, because the deluge of upvotes is making it difficult to achieve those spots. But the distressing thing, for me, is that replies are becoming less and less logical and reasoned. For example, the question wasn't whether it's a good thing for governments to be contracting with the private sector, or what the negative consequences might be. The question was, is the private sector more effective than the government, in general? Yet the reply was "[privatization advocates] are the ones who get the lucrative contracts and the politicians who support 'privatization' get the lucrative donations. Also, as government diminishes, the wealthy and powerful grow even more powerful," which is totally unrelated to the question at hand. Anyway. What I just did is against the rules, so I'll stop now. Sorry. I'm just becoming concerned with the timbre of the site, and feel like there is no outlet to discuss this kind of thing.
keypusher 12y ago
In some way the assumption that the private sector can do it better is supported by NASA itself, it's why they have contracted missions to the ISS out to SpaceX and Orbital Sciences, who have managed to successfully fill those contracts for $500 million (less money than NASA was spending on a single space shuttle launch). I have tremendous respect for the work NASA has done, but there are deep flaws at the agency, and they realize it as much as everyone else does.
- kevinbache 12y ago
  NASA says their average space shuttle launch cost was $450 million. https://www.google.com/search?q=how+much+does+one+space+shuttle+launch+cost https://www.google.com/search?q=how+much+does+one+space+shut... edit: forgot the "million"
  - keypusher 12y ago
    I should have been more clear. $500 million was the cost for the entire commercial contracts program, as someone else pointed out below that is ~$150 million per launch. Whether NASA spent $450 or $500 million on a shuttle launch is somewhat irrelevant, either way it is far more than the cost of private missions performing the same service.
    - iwwr 12y ago
      The Shuttle was originally an Air Force partnership where NASA was supposed to also launch the USAF's payloads, including spy satellites and the like. The 20-ton payload created major compromises as far as reusability and then the USAF wasn't interested once the thing was built.
    - kllrnohj 12y ago
      1 shuttle launch: $450M (reality) 7 people 53,600lb to LEO 1 SpaceX dragon launch (ignoring for a second that it doesn't exist yet): $160M (target) 7 people 7,300LB to LEO So even if the Dragon V2 comes in at its targetted price and capacities (and all historical evidence says it very much will not do that), it'll take 7 launches of it to match the payload of a single Shuttle launch. Doing some quick math here... 7 * $160M is... a hell of a lot more than $450M So pound for pound the shuttle is half the cost of the Dragon V2's estimated price. And in terms of actually mission profiles take something like STS-31, the Hubble launch. Payload mass there was 26,187lbs. Assuming that weight could somehow be split perfectly into 7,300 chunks and assembled in space that's still 4 launches on the Dragon V2, or $640M.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
seanflyon 12y ago
> Really, we need to point to a specific private sector organization. SpaceX. I agree that NASA has done more for space exploration than the private sector and that SpaceX would not be where it is today without NASA funding, but SpaceX is doing more per dollar than NASA is by a wide margin. I would guess that NASA will be the first to land a human on Mars, but I would also guess that they will lift off in a SpaceX rocket.
- Daishiman 12y ago
  SpaceX sits atop decades of resources in what constitutes sound aerospace engineering practices, and is being helped by the fact that their scope is far, far more limited than NASA's. Private contractors given good specifications are certainly very effective at what they do, but I really doubt that they'd be as good if they were to go on a purely exploratory , basic research-like mission where objectives are fuzzier.
  - kiba 12y ago
    Their scope is to colonize Mars. NASA's scope is to land a man on Mars. In some way, SpaceX's scope is much more ambitious than NASA.
    - Daishiman 12y ago
      SpaceX's scope is irrelevant until they can be viable without substantial assistance from Mars, from the point of view of the private-is-better supporters. It's most likely that space exploration will always be a public-private mixture given the political and military interests in play, and the fact that a privately-funded endeavor of such magnitude would be extremely unlikely to survive a failure, and no one in their right mind would underwrite such a project. It's funny that people praise private companies' willingness to be flexible beyond bureaucracy yet they forget that a company can only survive for so long without positive returns and that limits their risk tolerance tremendously. Heck, consider how few companies are willing to do basic research nowadays.
      - 12y ago
zo1 12y ago
>"These things happen in private sector organizations too; the assumption that the private sector somehow will do it better needs to be supported." Sure, here's one study that supports that assumption: http://hkis.org.hk/ufiles/200512-bclam.pdf http://hkis.org.hk/ufiles/200512-bclam.pdf Took a bit of searching, seeing as I don't have access to any Journals. However, I did find more references, and no doubt you'll find quite a bit of other studies in the citations of this one. >"Their achievements are staggering;" So has their budget. I just did a quick calculation from their wikipedia funding page. Since its inception, NASA has received 1069.323 billion dollars in 2014-inflation-adjusted dollars. That's a trillion dollars that could have been spent solving world hunger, poverty, disease, even income equality. Sure, there have been all sorts of side-effects from all that NASA R&D, but let's not try to compare apples to oranges here. Because you can't really compare public and private institutions' achievements. One has to earn the profits it spends on fancy R&D, and the other simply has to ask for it in the government budget.
- ceejayoz 12y ago
  > That's a trillion dollars that could have been spent solving world hunger, poverty, disease, even income equality. Alternate view: we could be a little less warmongery for a decade or so and easily fund the entirety of NASA's history 4-6 times over. http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/study-iraq-afghan-war-costs-to-top-4-trillion/2013/03/28/b82a5dce-97ed-11e2-814b-063623d80a60_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/study-...
  - siquick 12y ago
    We could solve all that stuff easily right now without cutting NASA's budget.
  - zo1 12y ago
    A further alternate view. We could stop the warmongering entirely, and the NASA funding... Using all those combined trillions of dollars on making the world a better place. On a side note, I completely agree with you. To us there are completely varying degrees on what we consider useful spending. And on the war-funding we are in agreement; that money should be used first before NASA's funding.
ad_hominem 12y ago
> These things happen in private sector organizations too; the assumption that the private sector somehow will do it better needs to be supported. Regardless of which one does it better, NASA is funded through forcefully-extracted US tax dollars. They can be as stagnant and bureaucratically bloated as they want to be thanks to moral hazard. I'll gladly support space exploration, but it should be using resources that are donated voluntarily.
- pron 12y ago
  I know I'm philosophizing, but let me challenge the views you express with the following: people opposed to government and taxes always assume that taxes are "taken" or "extracted" from private property. Historically, though, the opposite is true: private property was extracted from common property and given to private individuals. Shared property predates private property by more than a few millennia. In fact, private property had to be invented when the agricultural revolution came about. That an individual (as opposed to a tribe) could own something was a big revolution in human thinking, and an artificial cultural construct. This doesn't change much in how people think about distribution of wealth, but it seems like people, especially in the US, seem to believe that private property is the natural state of things and government infringes on that, even though the opposite is true. Society decided to let individuals own some things -- not the other way around.
  - ad_hominem 12y ago
    I'm not under any illusion that "private property" is some kind of perfect solution (even libertarians schism into geolibertarians, libertarian socialists, etc. around the sticky issue), but let's not fly off into pure philosophy land here. This situation is pretty direct: the federal gov't, and by extension NASA, skims off my paycheck to fund what it thinks are noble endeavors. Unfortunately this leviathan that nobly funds NASA also spends trillions dropping bombs on brown people halfway across the planet, funding revolutions to topple governments, and violently suppressing victimless crimes (e.g. drug use, prostitution) that have a very real negative impact on my life and the lives of others I have no qualms with. If we could decide which systems to voluntarily contribute to, which ones would be funded?
fab13n 12y ago
> These things happen in private sector organizations too It's not a matter of public/private indeed, it's a matter of size. The bigger an organization, the more dis-aligned individual and collective incentives become. * In a start-up you can't afford to harm the enterprise in order to further your own interest: if you act parasitically you'll kill your host almost immediately. * In a big company, you won't make a meaningful difference, neither positively nor negatively, so you may as well serve your own interests, irrespective of their effect on the whole company. Corollary: people who want to play corporate politics concentrate in big companies, because that's where you can do it with relative impunity. Big private companies offset this competitive disadvantage through economy of scales and/or lobbying; public services do it through taxes and monopolies. NASA isn't inefficient because it's public, but because it's huge. Its only chance to beat SpaceX would have been through political influence, the way taxis lobby against Uber (or car dealers against Tesla, AT&T against antitrust laws...), but it's too late, SpaceX is already too visibly successful and too useful: any politician killing it would be classified as corrupt / communist / whatever you call a shameless apparatchik in the USA.
runeks 12y ago
> These things happen in private sector organizations too; the assumption that the private sector somehow will do it better needs to be supported. The difference is that NASA will likely keep getting their money regardless of whether they can come up with a viable plan. In the private sector, investors are usually not interested in financing an enterprise if it can't produce a viable plan. I don't think there's much difference between NASA and SpaceX in terms of professionalism of the teams. The big difference is the incentive of the two companies: SpaceX either has to turn a profit, or their owners have to be willing to provide capital without seeing a return. NASA has no such restrictions, and can keep operating without turning a profit. It's a lot like nature, really. Zoo animals don't have to hunt for food, and can lie around all day and be fed. Wild animals have to hunt for food, or they die. So if a wild animal were to meet a zoo animal, and a battle ensues, who wins? The animal that is used to lying around all day, or the animal that has to fight to survive? The two animals are not different in quality (both may be lions, for example), but they operate with very different incentives. It's not necessarily pretty, but it works. Wild animals grow strong because if they don't, they die. Private companies grow strong because if they don't, they go bankrupt.

humanrebar 12y ago

> the assumption that the private sector somehow will do it better needs to be supported Well, the assumption is that a healthy private sector can't support itself with coercion(1), so if a private organization fails too much it changes its direction or ceases to exist. Also, you can disrupt private initiative peacefully, but disrupting the government is usually a pretty drastic action that costs a lot of resources, even lives. (1) There are unfair practices in the private sector like monopolies and fraud... which are at least nominally against the rules in liberal democracies. If we allow that the government fails to enforce its rules, I'm not sure why we're confident about its ability to execute in other areas.

hackuser 12y ago
> the assumption is that a healthy private sector can't support itself with coercion(1), so if a private organization fails too much it changes its direction or ceases to exist. Also, you can disrupt private initiative peacefully, but disrupting the government is usually a pretty drastic action that costs a lot of resources, even lives. I think it's the opposite: We disrupt government every 2 years by firing various leaders; every 4-8 years we replace the entire executive leadership. If a government leader fails to often, they change their direction (as many politicians do!) or lose their job.
- humanrebar 12y ago
  > I think it's the opposite: We disrupt government every 2 years by firing various leaders; every 4-8 years we replace the entire executive leadership. I'm not talking about leadership, I'm talking about organization. As in bureaucracies. It's extremely hard for any leader to streamline an organization. It's possible though difficult in a private organization. I'm not familiar with a national government that has, say, dropped its headcount by 50%. If a private organization can't successfully make that sort of change, it gets disrupted eventually. But governments don't get disrupted like that without something drastic happening.

DINKDINK 12y ago

One could make the argument that the organizations that manage their processes with the least amount of in-fighting will be the ones that survive.

sillysaurus3 12y ago

These things happen in private sector organizations too; the assumption that the private sector somehow will do it better needs to be supported. It's the private sector. It does better than the government practically by definition. Sometimes it even does a better job at killing, which is why private contractors exist for warfare, such as Blackwater/Academi. If this wasn't true, then the government wouldn't contract the private sector for various tasks. But it does, all the time, because contracting is far more effective, and results matter. It seems like your view of NASA is rather rose-tinted. Along with the impressive, courageous explorers, there are political opportunists and all of the other drama you'd expect of any large organization. It will be interesting to find out whether the private sector or the public sector reaches Mars first. EDIT: Regarding the political nature of NASA: http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/rogers-commission/Appendix-F.txt http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/roger... That was a different time. In fact, it was an entirely different generation of people. But the important question is, in what ways has NASA changed since then? EDIT 2: So, this is a troll comment, then? I'm becoming a little disenchanted with HN, actually. It's grown large enough that the voting system seems to be becoming less and less relevant. There's a certain effect that you see on Reddit where, if someone disagrees with your point, then they will downvote your comment and every subsequent comment you made, regardless of content. I've noticed the same thing happening here on HN, and it's a very recent phenomenon. I've also observed it happening to others, not just myself. I've restrained myself from talking about it, but I think I'll go ahead and speak up at this point. I'm not sure what to do about this, actually. HN has always been a kind of second home to me, but now it's too large to have meaningful conversations. In order to even get into a position to have a conversation, you have to either be one of the top comments in the thread, or you have to reply to one of the top comments. This is less true than it is for Reddit, but it's definitely happening. The problem is this: Those who are quickest to a thread are usually the ones who will get those top spots, rather than the most reasoned or comprehensive comment. HN has some defenses against this; for example, all comments appear at the top of the thread for a limited time period, and ostensibly the voting system is supposed to keep the good ones there. But HN is growing so massive that those algorithms may need some tweaking, because the deluge of upvotes is making it difficult to achieve those spots. But the distressing thing, for me, is that replies are becoming less and less logical and reasoned. For example, the question wasn't whether it's a good thing for governments to be contracting with the private sector, or what the negative consequences might be. The question was, is the private sector more effective than the government, in general? Yet the reply was "[privatization advocates] are the ones who get the lucrative contracts and the politicians who support 'privatization' get the lucrative donations. Also, as government diminishes, the wealthy and powerful grow even more powerful," which is totally unrelated to the question at hand. Anyway. What I just did is against the rules, so I'll stop now. Sorry. I'm just becoming concerned with the timbre of the site, and feel like there is no outlet to discuss this kind of thing.

keypusher 12y ago

In some way the assumption that the private sector can do it better is supported by NASA itself, it's why they have contracted missions to the ISS out to SpaceX and Orbital Sciences, who have managed to successfully fill those contracts for $500 million (less money than NASA was spending on a single space shuttle launch). I have tremendous respect for the work NASA has done, but there are deep flaws at the agency, and they realize it as much as everyone else does.

kevinbache 12y ago
NASA says their average space shuttle launch cost was $450 million. https://www.google.com/search?q=how+much+does+one+space+shuttle+launch+cost https://www.google.com/search?q=how+much+does+one+space+shut... edit: forgot the "million"
- keypusher 12y ago
  I should have been more clear. $500 million was the cost for the entire commercial contracts program, as someone else pointed out below that is ~$150 million per launch. Whether NASA spent $450 or $500 million on a shuttle launch is somewhat irrelevant, either way it is far more than the cost of private missions performing the same service.
  - iwwr 12y ago
    The Shuttle was originally an Air Force partnership where NASA was supposed to also launch the USAF's payloads, including spy satellites and the like. The 20-ton payload created major compromises as far as reusability and then the USAF wasn't interested once the thing was built.
  - kllrnohj 12y ago
    1 shuttle launch: $450M (reality) 7 people 53,600lb to LEO 1 SpaceX dragon launch (ignoring for a second that it doesn't exist yet): $160M (target) 7 people 7,300LB to LEO So even if the Dragon V2 comes in at its targetted price and capacities (and all historical evidence says it very much will not do that), it'll take 7 launches of it to match the payload of a single Shuttle launch. Doing some quick math here... 7 * $160M is... a hell of a lot more than $450M So pound for pound the shuttle is half the cost of the Dragon V2's estimated price. And in terms of actually mission profiles take something like STS-31, the Hubble launch. Payload mass there was 26,187lbs. Assuming that weight could somehow be split perfectly into 7,300 chunks and assembled in space that's still 4 launches on the Dragon V2, or $640M.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

seanflyon 12y ago

> Really, we need to point to a specific private sector organization. SpaceX. I agree that NASA has done more for space exploration than the private sector and that SpaceX would not be where it is today without NASA funding, but SpaceX is doing more per dollar than NASA is by a wide margin. I would guess that NASA will be the first to land a human on Mars, but I would also guess that they will lift off in a SpaceX rocket.

Daishiman 12y ago
SpaceX sits atop decades of resources in what constitutes sound aerospace engineering practices, and is being helped by the fact that their scope is far, far more limited than NASA's. Private contractors given good specifications are certainly very effective at what they do, but I really doubt that they'd be as good if they were to go on a purely exploratory , basic research-like mission where objectives are fuzzier.
- kiba 12y ago
  Their scope is to colonize Mars. NASA's scope is to land a man on Mars. In some way, SpaceX's scope is much more ambitious than NASA.
  - Daishiman 12y ago
    SpaceX's scope is irrelevant until they can be viable without substantial assistance from Mars, from the point of view of the private-is-better supporters. It's most likely that space exploration will always be a public-private mixture given the political and military interests in play, and the fact that a privately-funded endeavor of such magnitude would be extremely unlikely to survive a failure, and no one in their right mind would underwrite such a project. It's funny that people praise private companies' willingness to be flexible beyond bureaucracy yet they forget that a company can only survive for so long without positive returns and that limits their risk tolerance tremendously. Heck, consider how few companies are willing to do basic research nowadays.
    - 12y ago

zo1 12y ago

>"These things happen in private sector organizations too; the assumption that the private sector somehow will do it better needs to be supported." Sure, here's one study that supports that assumption: http://hkis.org.hk/ufiles/200512-bclam.pdf http://hkis.org.hk/ufiles/200512-bclam.pdf Took a bit of searching, seeing as I don't have access to any Journals. However, I did find more references, and no doubt you'll find quite a bit of other studies in the citations of this one. >"Their achievements are staggering;" So has their budget. I just did a quick calculation from their wikipedia funding page. Since its inception, NASA has received 1069.323 billion dollars in 2014-inflation-adjusted dollars. That's a trillion dollars that could have been spent solving world hunger, poverty, disease, even income equality. Sure, there have been all sorts of side-effects from all that NASA R&D, but let's not try to compare apples to oranges here. Because you can't really compare public and private institutions' achievements. One has to earn the profits it spends on fancy R&D, and the other simply has to ask for it in the government budget.

ceejayoz 12y ago
> That's a trillion dollars that could have been spent solving world hunger, poverty, disease, even income equality. Alternate view: we could be a little less warmongery for a decade or so and easily fund the entirety of NASA's history 4-6 times over. http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/study-iraq-afghan-war-costs-to-top-4-trillion/2013/03/28/b82a5dce-97ed-11e2-814b-063623d80a60_story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/study-...
- siquick 12y ago
  We could solve all that stuff easily right now without cutting NASA's budget.
- zo1 12y ago
  A further alternate view. We could stop the warmongering entirely, and the NASA funding... Using all those combined trillions of dollars on making the world a better place. On a side note, I completely agree with you. To us there are completely varying degrees on what we consider useful spending. And on the war-funding we are in agreement; that money should be used first before NASA's funding.

ad_hominem 12y ago

> These things happen in private sector organizations too; the assumption that the private sector somehow will do it better needs to be supported. Regardless of which one does it better, NASA is funded through forcefully-extracted US tax dollars. They can be as stagnant and bureaucratically bloated as they want to be thanks to moral hazard. I'll gladly support space exploration, but it should be using resources that are donated voluntarily.

pron 12y ago
I know I'm philosophizing, but let me challenge the views you express with the following: people opposed to government and taxes always assume that taxes are "taken" or "extracted" from private property. Historically, though, the opposite is true: private property was extracted from common property and given to private individuals. Shared property predates private property by more than a few millennia. In fact, private property had to be invented when the agricultural revolution came about. That an individual (as opposed to a tribe) could own something was a big revolution in human thinking, and an artificial cultural construct. This doesn't change much in how people think about distribution of wealth, but it seems like people, especially in the US, seem to believe that private property is the natural state of things and government infringes on that, even though the opposite is true. Society decided to let individuals own some things -- not the other way around.
- ad_hominem 12y ago
  I'm not under any illusion that "private property" is some kind of perfect solution (even libertarians schism into geolibertarians, libertarian socialists, etc. around the sticky issue), but let's not fly off into pure philosophy land here. This situation is pretty direct: the federal gov't, and by extension NASA, skims off my paycheck to fund what it thinks are noble endeavors. Unfortunately this leviathan that nobly funds NASA also spends trillions dropping bombs on brown people halfway across the planet, funding revolutions to topple governments, and violently suppressing victimless crimes (e.g. drug use, prostitution) that have a very real negative impact on my life and the lives of others I have no qualms with. If we could decide which systems to voluntarily contribute to, which ones would be funded?

fab13n 12y ago

> These things happen in private sector organizations too It's not a matter of public/private indeed, it's a matter of size. The bigger an organization, the more dis-aligned individual and collective incentives become. * In a start-up you can't afford to harm the enterprise in order to further your own interest: if you act parasitically you'll kill your host almost immediately. * In a big company, you won't make a meaningful difference, neither positively nor negatively, so you may as well serve your own interests, irrespective of their effect on the whole company. Corollary: people who want to play corporate politics concentrate in big companies, because that's where you can do it with relative impunity. Big private companies offset this competitive disadvantage through economy of scales and/or lobbying; public services do it through taxes and monopolies. NASA isn't inefficient because it's public, but because it's huge. Its only chance to beat SpaceX would have been through political influence, the way taxis lobby against Uber (or car dealers against Tesla, AT&T against antitrust laws...), but it's too late, SpaceX is already too visibly successful and too useful: any politician killing it would be classified as corrupt / communist / whatever you call a shameless apparatchik in the USA.

runeks 12y ago

> These things happen in private sector organizations too; the assumption that the private sector somehow will do it better needs to be supported. The difference is that NASA will likely keep getting their money regardless of whether they can come up with a viable plan. In the private sector, investors are usually not interested in financing an enterprise if it can't produce a viable plan. I don't think there's much difference between NASA and SpaceX in terms of professionalism of the teams. The big difference is the incentive of the two companies: SpaceX either has to turn a profit, or their owners have to be willing to provide capital without seeing a return. NASA has no such restrictions, and can keep operating without turning a profit. It's a lot like nature, really. Zoo animals don't have to hunt for food, and can lie around all day and be fed. Wild animals have to hunt for food, or they die. So if a wild animal were to meet a zoo animal, and a battle ensues, who wins? The animal that is used to lying around all day, or the animal that has to fight to survive? The two animals are not different in quality (both may be lions, for example), but they operate with very different incentives. It's not necessarily pretty, but it works. Wild animals grow strong because if they don't, they die. Private companies grow strong because if they don't, they go bankrupt.