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SpaceX is still blowing up rockets like it's 1950s NASA, maybe we should just fully fund the competent folks at 2020s NASA instead.

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Occurrence of failures directly correlates to occurrence of growth and innovation. SpaceX is (a) innovating very fast, and therefore we see lots of failures, (b) embracing those failures as opportunities to grow, and (c) installing many sensors and collecting a lot of data to maximize the chance that they can learn a lot from whatever failures occur.

Make no mistake, if a company or institution isn't trying a lot and failing a lot to achieve a new type of goal, it's also not making much progress toward any new type of goal.

Then why shouldn't we apply this same standard to government projects? Any time a government project doesn't go perfectly it's used an excuse to scrap the very concept of government since "they can't do anything right".

As far as I'm concerned, the government is free to innovate, as long as my daily life (and that of my fellow Americans) is not part of what's being experimented with. We have the entire corpus of world history to refer to for experimental data on government policy -- let's use it as much as possible. Social crises aren't worth creating for the data they yield.

Regarding technical innovation, NASA did a lot of that in the 1960s. There were a lot of failures then (Mercury and Gemini programs), followed by incredible success (Apollo program). NASA's work with SpaceX is another great form of innovation -- pick the most innovative commercial partners and move forward.

The US culture around government is really weird. And yes, if people gave the government permission to fail sometimes they could probably do things 10x cheaper. But that requires a level of trust that just isn't there. I don't know why, and I'm glad I live somewhere more functional.

No only does lack of trust prevent innovation, on the other end of the spectrum you have people who won't tolerate failure because it might give the distrustful of government people data point or talking point.

I'm more critical of SpaceX but I have to admit that they've managed to blow up a lot of hardware without killing any passengers. That suggests they know what they're doing.

NASA seems confident enough in SpaceX's ability to award them a contract for Starship to take them back to the moon.

"This is but one of many genuinely shocking aspects of NASA's decision a week ago to award SpaceX—and only SpaceX—a contract to develop, test, and fly two missions to the lunar surface. The second flight, which will carry astronauts to the Moon, could launch as early as 2024."

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/04/five-reasons-why-nas...

I love how whenever SpaceX fails to land a booster that I see headlines of "SpaceX blows up another rocket", even if it still delivered its payload to orbit.

I do wonder, however, where NASA would be if they would have continued with the DC-X prototype instead of abandoning it when it had a landing leg failure causing it to topple over in an early test.

It's because of Elon's hubris and the ways that hubris is baked into the entire institutional culture. I think far fewer people would delight in their failures if they showed an ounce of humility from any of their mistakes. Instead, they continue to make wild eyed proclamations and promises of impossible goals, but it's Elon so people continue to believe him for some reason.

Great progress comes from Elon's hubris.

> people continue to believe him for some reason.

I believe in him, and the reason is obvious. He gets things done nobody else seems able to.

SpaceX also blew up a huge amount of their Falcon rockets at the beginning too, and now they're consistently bringing astronauts to the ISS and payloads into orbit. So I'm not sure what your point is.

I'd rather have them fail their first 9 attempts that each take a month before succeeding, than succeeding on the first attempt that takes a decade.

Failure during research & development isn't necessarily a bad thing.

NASA/JPL have an ample history of blowing up experimental rockets. Same as the Russians. The Germans had it hard with the V2s as well

I'd recommend people to look up into those previous failures (and SpaceX is finding "new ways" to fail)

lol. I rarely test my code, but when I do, I test it on prod.

Unit tests can't catch all bugs ;)

See the book "V2" by Dornberger on all the failures of the V2 rockets. Quite a good read.

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