NASA will pay $146M for each SLS rocket engine

But do we really need those C*O jobs and increased shareholder value? Probably keeping many of rocket science jobs could have been cheaper for taxpayers. But no one cares about that today, our children will be paying our debt, not us.

"Outdated" also means well-researched, well-tested, with very little unknown unknowns. I do not mean "safer", necessarily - but the data about how safe they are is much more reliable.

> If you are a tech company are you going to run your own outdated servers at 10x the cost because you would like to preserve institutional knowledge about running outdated hardware ?

As a startup CTO, I will think twice about using the freshest framework or programming language, which is sexy and cool - just because I haven't seen enough people use it long enough yet. I will build a hobby project with it and love it, but or a small product that is allowed to fail, but I will not start an important new product with something like that.

The cloud hardware metaphor is a good one.

Preserving knowledge is easy and cheap.

Preserving capability (that is to say, people and companies with knowledge and ability to use it) is not.

To use the metaphor, a huge part of the military procurement budget is dedicated to continue building, deploying, and operating on-prem servers.

Not because it's more efficient, but because at an international level, having a cloud provider (or in this case Russia or China) tell you "No" when you ask to renew or expand, is unacceptable.

Unlike tech, machine shops filled with trained people can't be provisioned with a click...

The purpose of the space program isn't to explore space, it's to consume federal funds, accruing influence and kickback contributions to the politicians who arrange it.

It's important you understand this primary purpose if you want to understand what happens at NASA.

If you are a space program supporter who is okay with the situation as long as NASA is getting money, then you are the reason they can get away with this. Thanks a lot.

As far as I can tell, this is the space industry's "Wile E. Coyote" moment[1]. A long one at that.

This kind of largely unquestioned cost structure ("cost plus" contracts[2][3]) has been going on for such a long time now that nobody in that part of the industry has really accepted that the party is over.

And of course industry players don't actually have to accept that the party is over as long as government pays those old-style prices, which have been outrageous for some time and have only gone up. (They seem to have gone up even more egregiously recently, which might be an indication that industry is actually very well aware that the game is up and is trying to rake in as much as possible while they still can).

And yes, there are justifications, some of which may also be reasons (jobs, know-how, whatever ...), but I am sure that inertia is a huge part of this. If this were being decided from scratch, I doubt the outcome would be the same.

And yes, the current industry is almost certainly doomed. Yes, Falcon and Falcon Heavy are already dramatically cheaper. But Starship, if it works, is something else entirely. Game over.

I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation that showed a fleet of 10 Starships, if reused as planned, having such an increase of capacity over what we have now that the current yearly launch capacity of the entire world becomes a footnote, a few percent of what those Starships will be able to haul into orbit by themselves.

And they're planning to mass-produce these.

Game over.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wile_E._Coyote_and_the_Road_Ru...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost-plus_contract

[3] https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/07/elon-musk-knows-what...