IN A NUTSHELL 🚀 The International Space Station (ISS) faces rising safety concerns due to structural cracks and air leaks. 💰 Proposed NASA budget cuts by the Trump administration threaten the safe deorbiting of the ISS by 2030. 🛰️ SpaceX is contracted to develop a U.S. Deorbit Vehicle (USDV), but Elon Musk suggests an earlier
I don’t understand why it’s so complicated for people to understand that the government can offer things at the lowest possible cost because the government doesn’t have to make profit. Any private industry running at equal efficiency to public industry will, necessarily, cost more because it must build in margins for profit. Literally anything else a private company can do, so could the government.
Private industry cannot save us. It cannot be cheaper. This is not complicated math it’s extremely simple and yet seemingly completely impossible for the vast majority of Americans to understand
Yeah, if it’s all being done in-house by state industry then all else being equal it will be cheaper than a private alternative. But “bringing down costs” and technological innovation are known effects of competition between firms and is a reason why China uses markets and also a reason why Chinese aerospace is in a better long term position than the US’s. For most of NASA’s history, the way it funded the development of launch vehicles was not conducive to bringing down costs whatsoever. The current paradigm is better, although like you suggest it is not the only alternative.
The issue with NASA was that they were the sole client for one industry until recently, and they choose to pick one or two companies to work with to simplify their own admin (as well as grease palms since it’s a political entity in a capitalist state).
That creates monopoly and immediately defeats any possible benefit from “natural selection” in the market. They also tend towards that because the most optimal configuration is a unified state run industry that is allowed to build up the institutional knowledge that their current private counterparts (Boeing and Lockheed) have, while also ignoring the drive for profits.
If there isn’t already an industry in place that can meet those knowledge requirements (as is China’s case), then allowing them to develop, then consuming them is the only really sustainable course of action.
Only the Soviets managed to build a new tech industry from scratch, and that took military development between 2 world wars and almost half a century, China managed to get there using a hybrid of those models in a decade.
The other, deeper, issue with NASA is that Congress required them to do everything wrong on purpose and kept cutting their budget
“shuttle derived hardware”
Because people still believe in the Reagan line that profit is the best motive to bring out the best results from people. That, in a government agency, it’s just a bunch of bureaucrats half-assing and clocking out at their union-mandated 7.5 hours.
Whoa now, putting words into my mouth. That’s not something I ever said or believed. I’m just reflecting on the reality of our current existence, NASA spent a lot of money on rockets, It would have been the best possible outcome if NASA “offered things at the lowest possible cost”. But they didn’t, and our timeline missed the miracle where they did that.
They did give contracts to private industry to develop rockets In the hopes of driving down launch costs for themselves and their plan worked, that’s what happened.
I’m a pretty big space enthusiast and I like to fantasize that I may someday be able to go to space before I die, I’m fairly young, but I know probably not. However because of that I’m happy about the reality we got, even if it’s not the best one. It’s certainly not the worst reality we could’ve had. Plus (if NASAs budget wasn’t getting gutted) NASA can now allocate more money to science missions like landers, probes, telescopes, and orbiters and that is just as exciting.
NASA has always been used to funnel money to arms dealer companies who actually make rockets for them. Like it never had its own factories or production pipeline, it was always just big handouts to corporate MIC contractors who were further financially incentivized to delay and drive up costs even more since the contracts let them do that completely unchecked.
It was also kept pretty tangential to what the US military wanted: they wanted ICBMs, so NASA did rocket research for them; they wanted satellites, so NASA did satellite launch research for them; they wanted some nonsense contraption for “space commandos” to steal Soviet satellites with, so NASA had to incorporate that into the Space Shuttle program which was further gutted to the point of barely being functional at all.
Well, you’re not gonna date Olivia Rodrigo going on like that.
But I feel you.
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