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
  • iridaniotter [she/her]English
    30•7 days ago

    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.

    • invalidusernamelol [he/him]English
      22•7 days ago

      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.