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Privatizing NASA

nytimes.com

26 pointskingkawn20 comments

A bit more about the cancellation of the moon program here: http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/space/os-no-moon-for-nas...

Hopefully their approach will be to further encourage private space travel. A quote from Rand Simberg, an aerospace engineer: "It’s not NASA’s job to send a man to Mars. It’s NASA’s job to make it possible for the National Geographic Society to send a man to Mars."

I disagree on the Mars assertion. Commodity space travel, such as taking satellites and people to LEO, makes perfect sense as a commercial enterprise. Even the Moon is within reach for commercial spaceflight. However, the amount of work and innovation required to put the first man on Mars, an endeavor with no commercial prospects in any reasonable timeframe, seems far beyond the financial reach of anything but a government.

I dare to bet that the Chinese will be the first to put a human on Mars: They have something to prove and being second on the moon just doesn't cut it.

I can only see this setting things back, mainly because of all the talent, methods and previous effort already gone into constellation.

It's probably good in the long run though to work towards privatizing it all, it seems so political the way it is now, it seems like the support for the program comes more from certain states making tax dollars off the program rather than a real thirst to explore the unknown.

That's the fallacy of sunk costs; the last time I checked Constellation was pushing back its schedule a year for every year. I gather there's been a bit more progress since then, but the Aries rockets are thoroughly misbegotten and killing those projects off won't hurt one bit in the long run, I suspect.

And NASA has been a public works project ever since the end of Apollo, there's nothing new there.

I bet space exploration will start to take-off with this more privatized approach as it is a little similar to how computers were funded by DoD - government contracts for building new technologies that private companies can compete to decrease the costs of.

http://history.sandiego.edu/GEN/recording/computer1.html

This time tho, I demand that all R&D funded by such contracts results in non-patentable tech. My tax dollars buy the research, I'll access my results.

Hasn't the DoD worked more the other way around--- cost-plus contracts with unlimited overruns reimbursed, for building new technologies that private companies can compete to increase the costs of? Defense contracting is a pretty notorious money pit.

There is a huge misconception about cost-plus contracting. It's actually the least expensive way to develop new technology, that's almost exclusively where it's used, and it's designed as a risk mitigation factor. In essence, if a company had to bid to develop some new technology, it's essentially impossible to estimate, so they would have to inflate their numbers pretty drastically to ensure they could cover their costs. In other words, to mitigate the risk of overruns, the company would inflate their price to way more than it should cost, since they are uncertain about realistic time-frames.

To mitigate this, the government will pay a company their actual cost plus a reasonable profit. This transfers the risk to the government, reducing their overall cost. To prevent abuses, the government must approve all costs, so they will place an engineering team with the contractor to perform this task. Contrary to popular belief, this system makes a great deal of sense as it relates to bidding risk, and is actually quite difficult to abuse.

Interesting. How do they deal with regulatory capture?

Why is cost-plus contracting less expensive than the government doing it in-house, except in the cases where it's a very rare one-off thing that's not worth developing in-house expertise for? If the government is bearing all risk, and the only oversight is government oversight (no market discipline), there's no real advantages to the private sector.

I'm eagerly awaiting an enthusiastic article from CATO claiming credit for this development.

in the whole thing about Obama wanting to clip NASA's wings and push privatization of space travel, no one seems to be asking the obvious question: what if there IS no way to run a profitable business around human space travel / going to the moon? Or, what if it's going to require another 50 or 100 years of technological advances by government space programs before that becomes commercially viable? Even if you are for commercialization of space travel, you ought to be against what Obama wants to do here, because it's possible we could be pushing the commercial human space travel baby bird out of the nest 50 years too soon and shooting the mother.

while Obama does seem to be increasing funding, he is reducing long-term obligation. The tangible benefits from going to space are small versus universal healthcare, solving environmental problems, etc.

Is NASA even relevant anymore? Build a business model that makes space travel profitable. Don't rely on the government to do it, because they'll do an incompetent job of it at 10,000x the cost that private enterprise can do it for.

I believe that is the motivation for the rumored change, to get more bang for the buck. NASA does some great things with planetary probes, etc., but their manned launch systems have always consumed prodigious amounts of money.

For example, the money SpaceX has spent to almost complete the development of their new NASA-funded launch system is approximately 1/20 of the projected cost overrun of the internal manned launch system NASA has been working on (the Aries I).

All we have to do is convince Google that a space race means more advertising opportunities, convince Microsoft that there are aliens who will buy MS Word, Twitter that there are hubris opportunities, and Facebook that there are beings on mars who want to be Poked, and the problem will be solved. Where there's a dollar sign, there's a way.

People are already using Twitter from space, so seems they're ahead in the game.

I would not risk war with a space-faring civilization by selling MS Word to them.

They wouldn't attack an inferior species. (At least I hope so.)

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