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Won't these people just wind up at Lockheed, Raytheon etc.. doing the same work for their customer NASA?
Meanwhile Pentagon just transferred a BILLION dollars from Nuclear Missile maintenance program to refurbish QatarForceOne Do we survive this? Are you sure? Because this is just the first six months, imagine by summer 2028 what things are going to be like with every single thing defunded, homeless and car-living exploding, etc.
So, uh, the camps will be funded and there will no longer be homeless... Man, sure glad the libs got owned.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Entrenched ways are not the same as institutional knowledge. I disagree, fundamentally. Institutional knowledge is a set of "truths" that are respected, so necessarily prune the solution space. The only way to get those pruned branches back is to disregard it , by reconsidering, and re-traversing that solution space.
In my eyes, institutional knowledge is figuring out what things do NOT work, not what did back then. When you lose that, you're wasting years or even decades hitting the exact same pitfalls the old guard hit once upon a time. Many truly bright minds aren't those asserting how this was the best method and then burying their heads in the sand when other ideas come out. My time working with some of the brightest minds i…
Yes, this is my point. It's pruning the solution space before traversing it. The diligent approach is to temporarily disregard that knowledge, and do a quick re-exploration to test if it's still true.
> to some extent
This was put in my first comment with severe intent, that many seemed to have missed.
They'll do this now and then act shocked when some of these ex nasa people end up working in Europe or China lol
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So many ways. The current paradigm is that it gets one chance and it has to be perfect. Starship (which I'm only referencing as the bleeding-edge launch vehicle) compared to Ariane 5 could be a fraction of half the cost, with double the volume and 4x the mass. With those constraints removed the science missions had a lot more flexibility in their design.
JWST cost $10B. The launch was expensive at $1.5B; but getting that down to $750M won’t really change the availability.
But haven't people wanted NASA to be more streamlined, and efficient? Not sure if that is reducing staffing, or changing its mission. SpaceX making such leaps and bounds over NASA had to be a shot across the bow.
This is the same argument people made for DOGE. "Don't we want the government to be more efficient?" Yes, nobody is going to argue the opposite. But there are ways of doing this that are rational, then there is the way this is happening. Using a chainsaw for fine cutting only works when you are an expert at chainsaws. Otherwise you're just chopping chunks off something with a dangerous tool. Of course this is assumin…
I mean if you were tasked with "government efficiency" don't you think the lowest hanging fruit would be the Pentagon budget? But, sure, go after air traffic control instead.
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Ever org I've worked for slowly became unable to innovate because of "institutional knowledge". I think it's important to forget, to some extent, every once in a while. It forces a new traversal of the problem space, but in a modern context, with modern tools, fresh eyes, and a better understanding of what's needed. Thus we have Space X. There are some great interviews with Jim Keller, who has a similar perspective:…
== if you want to stamp out a young engineers creativity, start them working in a big org.== Jim Keller’s own biography kind of dispels this notion. He worked at DEC for 16 years when he was a young engineer (24-40 years old).
They'll do this now and then act shocked when some of these ex nasa people end up working in Europe or China lol