Earlier quoted context omitted.
NASA is a political jobs program from a funding perspective. There isn't any way around that. This creates uncertainties, distractions and perverse incentives all around: 0. Everything is dramatically complicated by the artificial divisions of work across states needed to get enough political support. Grossly inefficient from the start, and inflexible into perpetuity. 1. Initial schedules are incentivized to be unrea…
>NASA is a political jobs program This is the truth, and while you could frame it as a negative, I see it as a huge positive. Because NASA has been subsidizing space for decades the US has a tremendous among of trained workers for aero-space. It was exactly that workforce that venture-capital based space industry was able to source talent from. I doubt spaceX would have been possible without NASA dumping billions int…
I see a clear split.
When NASA does something brand new, where private industry doesn't have incentives, it is a jobs program doing pioneering science, producing unique scientific and technological progress.
Since those projects would not get done otherwise, the inefficiencies are not really inefficiencies. Just cost of project.
But when NASA does something industry has found incentives for, the result is massive money-wasting redundant lower-quality, economically deadend work. The SLS is a monstrous parasite, tragically sucking up NASA/tax-payer resources. The only "purpose" for each build, launch & discard, vs. buying an economy class Starship ticket, is to "justify" the cost of doing so!
So I applaud NASA's manned missions in the past.
And I applaud NASA's current unmanned missions exploring our solar system and universe. And asteroid deflection missions. And human habitability research.
But manned transit, and near Earth resource missions, are best left to the growing list of companies that are funded, incentivized, better managed, and single mindedly optimizing those activities so well that they not only pay for themselves, but grow unbounded.