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Comment by r0naa | Hacker News Reader

If I understand correctly. I think that the parent comment is concerned about NASA favoring the research of technologies that have a potential for marketization rather than others, more "moonshot"-like projects.

Commercialization is good, as long as it does not leak everywhere.

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Exactly. If commercialization is done in way that does not distract from the principles of the research, it is great. But to achieve that, the incentives must be right. With Startup NASA, what is the incentive for NASA to keep doing moonshot-like projects, when they can make bank by investing only in profitable-in-the-near-future research? If the incentive is there, I am glad startup NASA exists. If not, I fear that Startup NASA will turn NASA into just another lab that has lost its focus.

Think about it. If people who work for NASA wanted to make bank, why would they work for NASA in the first place ? is NASA known as the best place to make bank, if that's your objective in life ? Is it going to become that place, as a result of this ? I understand the concern, but I think it's misplaced

The problem is not the people working at NASA wanting to make bank. It's the people overseeing those people realizing that there is a possibility to make bank, then pressuring the people working at NASA to do research to make bank. That's the change I fear.

But I wanted to respond to a different thing you said in the first comment:

> why not try to commercialize existing NASA technologies

I never said commercialization of the technologies is a bad thing. In fact, I'm all for it. But it has to be done in a way that doesn't break what's already being done right.

It won't be the decision of people who actually do the work, but of the people upstairs who decide what research the agency is focusing on.

The entire trend around public agencies trying to earn their own living on the market seems increasingly ridiculous. The whole point of having government agencies in a market economy at all is to have someone do the work that is necessary but doesn't make sense in market economy. Like feeding the poor, healing the sick, or doing basic research.

Agencies like NASA are one of two primary ways for society to tell the market: "you're a great optimization engine, but not perfectly aligned with our needs; sometimes you fail and we need to compensate - for instance, you rejected X, and yet we want X to be done". The other would be to become Elon Musk and keep shoving electric cars down market's throat until it gives up and suddenly there's a demand.

As Americans you can not - hell, as the world we can not afford agencies like NASA and ESA to drop basic research and pursue things that can be done by any random government contractor, but better, because said contractor would have less accumulated red tape.

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