They spent 30 years wasting the vast majority on ridiculous things like the Space Shuttle. Multiple billions of dollars to launch what Elon Musk will be launching for a measly 2 million.
Their science was always a rounding error on their pork.
Correct me if I'm wrong but didn't SpaceX benefit from the knowledge gained from (the failures of) NASA projects?
Knowledge doesn't start from scratch each time one starts a new project. I find it hard to argue that that money was a waste. It's a slippery slope to claiming that science shouldn't be funded, which we know is wrong; knowledge needs a space where it can fail without repercussions, this is how most modern technologies were invented [1].
Tangent: am I alone in thinking Windows 2000 was the last good version of Windows? I feel like it had most (if not all) of the Windows features that were/are actually important, but with none of the bloat.
Interestingly, Musk was supposed to launch manned vehicles into space years ago, but he's not been able to because... they keep exploding. And he's spent billions of dollars to get to that point, not 2 million.
I'm of the mind that the Space Shuttle was a misallocation of resources, but hindsight is 20/20, and there's no particular reason to think that, given the technology and constraints present at the time, anyone could have done much better than the engineers at NASA.
People forget it came about in an era of trying to out-spend the Soviet Union's military to make it collapse. The shuttle was built the way it was with the expectation of military launches. When those didn't materialize in sufficient quantity, they were left with an expensive ship that didn't serve any of the remaining uses well.
The science that came out of the Space Shuttle program was enormous[0].
Also, many of the people that work at SpaceX used to work on the Space Shuttle program. That's where they learned all their skills, and it's why they can launch with only $2M each.
Yeah, but the argument isn't that NASA should have stopped developing space tech. It's just the shuttle was an extremely expensive product that could have been designed better.
Lots of people made this case very strongly before the shuttle was finished. But NASA quickly became a political instrument to spread around pork, wasting decades of potential science projects because of gutless administrators and corrupt politicians. There is no reasonable defense of the Space Shuttle program.
Your comment can tell us a lot how technological progress works.
For instance, Mark Zuckerberg worked a couple of months to code Facebook on PHP, and be cheered as a computer wizard all over the world..
But we often forget the decades of work on Browsers/Web/Web 2.0, PHP, MySQL, OS's, internet protocols, etc.. not even taking into account the try-and-fail technologies (like SOUP et al.)
I think this is very unfair, because its like a bunch of people have worked hard pilling sheets of paper and when somebody put the last sheet of paper, somehow we forget about the guys who really make that tower and only the guy who put the top cherry, with the least effort is called a genius.
We get it that the world might see it like this, but here in HN we should understand that the real hard working geniuses are probably not getting the fame they deserve (with the exception of the likes like Linus Torvalds)
But guys like Zuckerberg, Jobs and Musk are definitely overated while Dennis Ritchie, Jeff Bonwick, Bill Joy, Rasmus Lerdorf, John von Neumann, Niklaus Wirth, etc.. are the people who we should really be thankful for, not just the guy who combine hard work to make something great and make billions of dollars out of it.
Ridiculous. Hindsight applied to NASA missions is the worst kind of selective thinking. The mandate was always zero tolerance for failure, first-of-its-kind missions not driven by reprodiceability or commercialization.
By definition, NASA moves away from what can be given to commercial partners. SpaceX is 50 years behind the curve for getting to Mars, so yeah, it's going to be cheaper. And you better believe SpaceX is hiring from a knowledge base built by government funding be it NASA or DoD.
Its absolutely no coincidence that funds are distributed across the country and businesses are employed where possible aka pork. To get congress behind a massive public scientific venture that's never been done... that's what you have to do nowadays. Dont blame the engineers (NASA) for bad management (congress).
It’s not hindsight, it was always clear to anyone not drinking the Space Shuttle kookaid. The Saturn V was a superior launch vehicle from day one. And if we’d have stuck with it we could have had billions in more science projects and likely ended up with drastically cheaper launches as it was improved. Hell maybe NASA would have seen if it could land one on its engines.
Their science was always a rounding error on their pork.
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