this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2024
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This wouldn't be a problem if we still had NASA doing the shuttle program, or some continuation of it, rather than outsourcing our spacecraft to the cutthroat lowest-bidder private sector. Is it really any surprise that SpaceX and Boeing are blowing up on the launchpads and having quality control issues when their sole objective is to make money? If we nationalized these initiatives again and cancelled the private contracts with these crooks, there would be no incentive for profiteering and corners would not get cut as often as they do now.
Sure, it would be a big cost to the taxpayer once again, but I think I'd rather have a reliable space program and like 2% less military budget to fund it, I think we'll manage somehow without producing more tanks and planes that nobody is asking for.
There is a reason we moved this to the private sector. Govt bureaucrats can't get out of their own way and every project triples in cost, with no single person calling the shots to get the job done. Govt cannot keep up with the pace we need.
Boeing is hot garbage.
SpaceX has a shit face, but they are incredibly competent and effective at iterating their way to space.
NASA in-house projects were historically expensive because they took the approach that they were building single-digit numbers of everything -- very nearly every vehicle was bespoke, essentially -- and because failure was a death sentence politically, they couldn't blow things up and iterate quickly. Everything had to be studied and reviewed and re-reviewed and then non-destructively tested and retested and integration tested and dry rehearsed and wet rehearsed and debriefed and revised and retested and etc. ad infinitum. That's arguably what you want in something like a billion dollar space telescope that you only need one of and has to work right the first time, but the lesson of SpaceX is that as long as you aren't afraid of failure you can start cheap and cheerful, make mistakes, and learn more from those mistakes than you would from packing a dozen layers of bureaucracy into a QC program and have them all spitball hypothetical failure modes for months.
Boeing, ULA and the rest of the old space crew are so used to doing things the old way that they struggle culturally to make the adaptations needed to compete with SpaceX on price, and then in Boeing's case the MBAs also decided that if they stopped doing all that pesky engineering analysis and QA/QC work they could spend all that labor cost on stock buybacks instead.
I agree with everything you say and I am all about the way that you captured the dysfunction of the political apparatus and its inability to deliver for a price and on a date. I think my argument is that that's exactly why the government should not be in charge of this stuff. It should not be political. I don't think there's any way to avoid billboards in space, but at least we'll be able to finally get out there.
The problem is that the private sector faces the same pressures about the appearance of failure. Imagine if Boeing adopted the SpaceX approach now and started blowing up Starliner prototypes on a monthly basis to see what they could learn. How badly would that play in the press? How quickly would their stock price tank? How long would the people responsible for that direction be able to hold on to their jobs before the board forced them out in favor of somebody who'd take them back to the conservative approach?
Heck, even SpaceX got suddenly cagey about their first stage return attempts failing the moment they started offering stakes to outside investors, whereas previously they'd celebrated those attempts that didn't quite work. Look as well at how the press has reacted to Starship's failures, even though the program has been making progress from launch to launch at a much greater pace than Falcon did initially. The fact of the matter is that SpaceX's initial success-though-informative-failure approach only worked because it was bankrolled entirely by one weird dude with cubic dollars to burn and a personal willingness to accept those failures. That's not the case for many others.