Space X has less bureaucracy and can pursue other commercial ventures. The amount nasa pays is high, but it’s still cheaper than continuing their old program
Comment on Why are people impressed with SpaceX?
farngis_mcgiles@sh.itjust.works 2 months agoNASA could have done this if they had the budget. Instead we’d rather give huge tax cuts to billionaires so they can build a private sector NASA to charge NASA exorbitant sums to use their private vehicles. It’s the most asinine and innefficient way of going about it.
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 2 months ago
AA5B@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Plus NASA can’t afford the risk. If SpaceX failed, no big deal. We would have lost some money and everyone would ridicule Musk. If NASA tried it and failed, they would not only have lost five times the money, but would be parylized by investigations, audits, cutbacks. NASA does a LOT more than just rockets and it would all be at risk
BastingChemina@slrpnk.net 2 months ago
No, NASA has the budget. They already spent $50 billion on the development of SLS and Orion, Starship development cost is estimated to be around $10 billion.
So in theory with the money they spent on SLS they could have built 5 starship program.
The problem is that NASA has to follow political interests, sometimes the political interests align with technical interest and we get great things like the Apollo program.
Someonelol@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
They also have a very tight tolerance of failure. Every failure made in the engineering process brings more and more scrutiny by those holding the purse strings in Washington.
DacoTaco@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Specially this. How space x handles failures is a very hard nono in my book. “But we test in the field” is what space x says, and as a software developer its like saying “we test in production”.
Yes youll get something use able faster, but its way way more costly in the long run and is nasty in between.
My arse they cant test this stuff on earth. We have simulations, models, calculations, test, everything. Yes, things can and will sometimes still fail when going in production ( in flight ) but you want to lower the risk of it failing cause its costly as fuck.
They dont seem to care though
DrownedRats@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Iterative development like that isn’t uncommon in engineering as a whole. Simulation can get you a long way but there’s a hard limit to that. You don’t think spacex designed a starship to use without running extensive simulations to try and figure it out before hand right?
Sometimes you need to test in the field just to find out what bits you missed. Structural engineers will simulate and calculate extensively but they’ll still build scale models and test pieces because it’s the most reliable and effective way to ensure you’re covering as many bases as possible.
Its not an either/or situation here. They’re doing the testing and simulation and applying it IRL to find out where things break.
farngis_mcgiles@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
That’s a good point.