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Comment by mikewarot | Hacker News Reader

Elon doesn't have to spread operations out across the country to keep jobs going in a bunch of congressional districts that sometimes shift on the outcomes of elections. He can just focus on getting things done. NASA would have to be given more leash than is possible in the current climate to actually have a hope of keeping up.

The world as they know it might be coming to an end, of course they're worried.

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I've worked on a huge space science project that was scattered across multiple countries in order to get the funding scale that the proposal seemed to require. We got the impression that in order to get the thing built, if we had relied upon a single organization to fund the project, it would have been far more easy to kill during development.

Most of us were new to this way of thinking. At the time, the engineers with the most experience in building these things had endured decades of minimal funding, and had learned to keep things as simple as possible. There was a lot of pushback against what was perceived as unnecessary complexity.

What is the quote, that organizations will expand towards supporting the organization, rather than the goals of the organization... Well.

Science is hard, rocket science more so. All of the other commercial launch programs have (as yet) failed to achieve anything close to sustainable orbital operations, unless they are also traditional aerospace defense contractors. ULA is Boeing/Northrop Grumman, and I can't recall but I think ArianneSpace is technically a commercial company rather than a national space agency. Both are very, very good at orbital launch. But comparing their funding structure to that of SpaceX seems a bit weird.

Well said. Administration after administration comes and goes and neither party fixes the problem, it's almost like there is one party and the dual party system is just to extract donations during election season. I feel like it's all a big show.

which, of course, is self-fulfilling.

While what you say is true, its not actually why these things happen. Government projects are inefficient as a result of how power structures naturally work. Nothing more.

Its like Conway's law, but for engineering physical systems!

Collective action is hard.

This is so true ... the amount of pork that's got to be bought just to get the (too small) NASA budget approved is horrendous. I'd argue that the "useful" funding for space programs is a few percent of what's spent. Imagine if we let Musk turn all that pork into bacon?

The strange thing is if you want to spread the money around to all the right districts, you could just as well do multiple low-cost projects. By letting single organizations do a whole project it should cost less. OTOH like someone said, it's harder to kill a project that's spread across so many areas.

SpaceX can just provide cheap launch services and we can have more large projects to send up!

A long time ago I worked in an EU R&D project where a third of the funding (~7billion Euros) was managed by a scandinavian telecom manufacturer.

One year after the start of the project, this manufacturer had done nothing, so the project leader made sure the work was transferred to a German SME which looked more active.

After another year, still nothing was done, so the project leader became very anxious.

What happened in the last 6 months of the project was that students did the work. But they probably were not aware that EU paid 7b for their work.

I got the impression this kind of behavior was not that uncommon.

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