So we can either put billions into one corporation in hope that a trickle of it lets the scientists and engineers do the thing scientists and engineers do, or we can put billions into a bunch of corporations in hope that a trickle of it lets the scientists and engineers do the thing scientists and engineers do.
What are you talking about?
NASA spends a fixed amount of money for launch contracts to put stuff into space.
NASA’s traditional method of contracting, where they would design something, and then having Boeing on retainer to keep asking for more money to build it, and then have congress step in at every step and tell them to use X contractor because it’s in their district, and then not actually get to build or test anything for decades, and then discovering problems and paying Boeing a fuck ton more money to “fix” those problems later, led to massive cost overruns and subpar performance on literally every single launch program they’ve had for the past several decades.
Now NASA is spending that fixed amount of money to SpaceX, Blue Origin, Boeing, etc. and gets a) orders of magnitude more stuff into space and b) does it with no risk of cost overruns since they’re all fixed price contracts.
Competitive bidding on fixed price contracts, is literally the alternative model that the government should have been using this whole time instead of subsidizing their traditional contractors with cost+ contracts.
The alternatives are setting up SoEs to build your rockets, or putting people responsible to the state and not the shareholders on the board to ensure the CEO is similarly minded.
There is a core conflict of interest in that every dollar of profit these companies make is a dollar that isn’t going into building the rocket or lowering the cost.
What are you talking about?
NASA spends a fixed amount of money for launch contracts to put stuff into space.
NASA’s traditional method of contracting, where they would design something, and then having Boeing on retainer to keep asking for more money to build it, and then have congress step in at every step and tell them to use X contractor because it’s in their district, and then not actually get to build or test anything for decades, and then discovering problems and paying Boeing a fuck ton more money to “fix” those problems later, led to massive cost overruns and subpar performance on literally every single launch program they’ve had for the past several decades.
Now NASA is spending that fixed amount of money to SpaceX, Blue Origin, Boeing, etc. and gets a) orders of magnitude more stuff into space and b) does it with no risk of cost overruns since they’re all fixed price contracts.
Competitive bidding on fixed price contracts, is literally the alternative model that the government should have been using this whole time instead of subsidizing their traditional contractors with cost+ contracts.
The alternatives are setting up SoEs to build your rockets, or putting people responsible to the state and not the shareholders on the board to ensure the CEO is similarly minded.
There is a core conflict of interest in that every dollar of profit these companies make is a dollar that isn’t going into building the rocket or lowering the cost.
But SpaceX has literally lowered the cost of a launch by an order of magnitude. They also are flying one of the most successful rockets ever flown.