7 ms·
> 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 an
by 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 agoSpaceX 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 agoTheir 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 agoSpaceX'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.
- DubiousPusher 12y agoWell argued. I would just add... 1 SpaceX's ambitions may be broader than NASA's but their individual engineering targets are not. 2 Private space companies wouldn't exist without the public space programs, not just from a technological standpoint but public contracts have been the largest and most dependable source of revenue for private space companies. 3 Though private companies suffer from the same bureaucratic problems as governments they are more flexible because internal fights can always be resolved one way or another by engaged and decisive management (should you find yourself lucky enough to have such management.) Hierarchies in public entities are not always allowed to settle conflicts between subordinates.
- carnaticfanatic 12y agoI guess we could conclude from this set of arguments that a mission spearheaded by public space organizations and supported by the scalable infrastructure private space corporations provide is going to be the mainstay of any future missions; mars or otherwise.
- jp555 12y ago"a company can only survive for so long without positive returns and that limits their risk tolerance tremendously" Don't you think Amazon's stock price says differently? To me, a private Mars colony sounds a lot like an Amazon. An endeavor with a very big mission and a very long execution time.
- Retra 12y agoAmazon's failures do not result in the obliteration of their most valuable infrastucture. A small hickup isn't likely to completely ruin their company, it will only set them back a small amount. Amazon isn't launching billion dollar servers that will explode in a big publicly visible fireball when you forget to plug a cable in.
- jp555 12y agoI'm not comparing what Amazon & SpaceX are making, but the very-long-horizon vision both companies are committing to. Amazon reinvests today's income to work towards what they want to be in the 2030s and beyond.
- carnaticfanatic 12y agoSpaceX's scope is first and foremost to continue as a profit maximizing entity. NASA exists to improve collective scientific knowledge and research. Say what you will about Elon Musk, but SpaceX is, and therefore, acts like a business.
- iwwr 12y agoWithout a firm mandate, a deadline and a budget it's kind of hard to pull off a Mars landing, or any sort of endeavor past Low-Earth Orbit.
- cfield 12y agoI think limited scope is exactly the point made by skriticos2. I don't doubt that a private entity is as capable of scope creep as a massive federal government institution. But I suspect mission-fatal scope creep occurs with less frequency with private entities than with massive federal government institutions.
- pekk 12y ago"massive" being the critical word, not "private" or "federal" or "government"
- dnautics 12y agoGoogle has had plenty of scope creep but it hasn't been mission-fatal
- maaku 12y agoAnd Google is orders of magnitude bigger by every reasonable measure than NASA both today and at the height of the Apollo programme. There are a dozen of other organizations we could point to (e.g. the largest oil or mining companies) which demonstrate that the private sector can organize on this scale quite well, thank you.
- Daishiman 12y agoGoogle doesn't have products that are expected to operate perfectly 15 years from now in outer space. Google's products can survive significant defects, have bug fix turnaround times measured in minutes, and worst case, can take some downtime without too much harm. When you talk about oil and mining companies, you mention the same ones that suffer dozens of spills, contamination incidents, and accidents? Or is there some sort of hypothetical perfect oil company with no accidents whatsoever? I think you have absolutely no clue of just how stupifying difficult it is to get equipment into space and surviving a reasonable amount of time.
- 12y ago
- krschultz 12y agoSpaceX is better at putting a pound of stuff in LEO than Nasa per dollar by a massive margin. But that's all they do right now. I want NASA to build payloads and the private sector to build rockets. But to say that the rockets are more important than the payloads is backwards.
- seanflyon 12y ago> But that's all they do right now. Well that and launch to GEO and design and build human spacecraft (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_V2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_V2) and are closer to cost effective re-usable rockets than anyone ever has been. > But to say that the rockets are more important than the payloads is backwards. I don't recall saying that rockets are more important than payloads, but neither one does much good without the other. I'm not even sure where you are drawing the line between payload and rocket. Is the rocket that takes people to Mars a payload, or the rocket that lands on Mars, or the rocket that leaves Mars? I am excited about SpaceX because they are dramatically reducing the cost of space exploration and industry. This makes everything NASA wants to do cheaper and more likely to actually happen.
- hyperbovine 12y agoIt's more than just NASA funding, a large number of the top guys at SpaceX are or were ex-NASA engineers (or NASA contractors). It's no coincidence that SpaceX hq is where it is (in El Segundo literally next door to Northrop, Raytheon, Lockheed, and so on); it makes the hiring that much easier. SpaceX is what you get when you cut through all the bureaucratic bs which plagues the NASA organization and let the NASA engineers do what they know how to do. Brilliant stroke on Musk's part, gotta hand it to him.
- crdoconnor 12y agoSpaceX is not well run because of magic private sector pixie dust. It is well run because of Elon Musk. For every Elon Musk there are a million private sector apparatchiks who run their organizations with all the efficiency of a Soviet shoe factory (see Comcast for a particularly pernicious example).
- justquest 12y agoComcast is a publicly traded company (NASDAQ: CMCSA & CMCSK), which makes it liable to a host of external pressures, legal and otherwise, that SpaceX as a currently privately-owned company is not.
- crdoconnor 12y agoNone of which have anything to do with why they suck.
- waterlesscloud 12y agoSure, but Musk would have MUCH less impact if he were inside an organization like NASA. All of his talents and advantages would be dampened to the point that they would make very little difference in the organization.
- crdoconnor 12y agoAnd why do you presume that? I think if he were running NASA it would probably be run pretty well.
- astine 12y agoNo, because he wouldn't really be running NASA the way he runs SpaceX. Government organizations are subject to a host of political influences that that don't affect the private sector. I used to work for the Library of Congress where the Librarian of Congress at the time was a political appointee who spent less time managing the collections and more time updating the carpets. NASA has worse problems because members of Congress see is as a tool for funneling pork spending. Any director of NASA would have to spend time playing politics with Congress in order to keep his funding and that would undermine any coherent vision that he brought to the enterprise. If buying rocket engines from Louisiana would save NASA billions in the long run, but funding depends on buying them from Alabama, Alabama it is. High-level government bureaucrats must be career fundraisers first and visionaries/competent managers second. As the sole owner of his own launch company, Musk as a degree of freedom that he could never get as a member of the government bureaucracy and it's that freedom that allows him to run SpaceX as well as he does. In lesser hands that freedom would be a noose, but at least in that case the cost of failure to the public would be very little.
- coldtea 12y agoSpaceX is nothing compared to NASA in scope (and history) and would be even less without NASA's (and general government) past work and experience.
- kllrnohj 12y ago> but SpaceX is doing more per dollar than NASA is by a wide margin. ...using NASA's money. SpaceX's money is coming from NASA. So, no, SpaceX is not doing more per dollar than NASA is. And fwiw SpaceX so far doesn't have anything resembling a rocket that'll make it to the Moon much less Mars. Let's first see if they can even get people into LEO first (using decades of research and knowledge that NASA paid for, of course)
- seanflyon 12y agoAmount done per dollar = total done / total spent It is fair to count everything SpaceX has done with NASA money as stuff NASA has gotten done, NASA still has an astronomically larger denominator. > And fwiw SpaceX so far doesn't have anything resembling a rocket that'll make it to the Moon much less Mars. fwiw NASA does not either and SpaceX is much closer. The Falcon Heavy is expected to launch next year and will be capable of putting 14 tons in a trans-Martian orbit to Mars.