More options are better than just NASA. SpaceX, Boeing, Blue Origin maybe in the future.
It'll be good for space travel and the space economy.
It'll be good for space travel and the space economy.
I am not American, so: not my money, not my country. I have no say in it... But I wonder if I am the only one to think like that.
No way. NASA is subject to the political whims of two branches of government. The executive branch is looking for short term wins and the legislative branch is looking for jobs in their districts.
The private market has introduced great innovations that are significantly driving down the cost of going to space.
The only difference is that public money now is financing private companies...
SpaceX is landing and reusing rockets every month, resulting in much lower launch costs, and you're saying the only difference is where the money is going? Get out of here.
I believe NASA has never produced everything in-house. They don't build (or even design, as far as I can tell) launch vehicles, spacecraft, EVA suits, computers etc. They come up with requirements and contract private companies to build hardware (and software, for that matter) meeting those requirements. For an example, see how the Apollo Lunar Module came to be [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Lunar_Module#Contract_l...
NASA doesn't run a rocket factory. It used to be that NASA specified and ordered hardware from contractors then integrated and operated it in house. The space shuttle orbiter was built by Rockwell (now ~Boeing), the external tank by Martin Marietta (now Lockheed Martin), the SRBs by Morton Thiokol (now ATK).
Commercial cargo and commercial crew change this model to NASA specifying and ordering missions or mission capabilities. This affords the vendor more autonomy in how they choose to solve problems, and NASA's still in the loop to sign off on their solutions. In principle, this approach contains cost overruns, since NASA pays only for the deliverable. What it doesn't contain are schedule overruns…
Others have commented on how NASA has never built very much in-house.
But I'll go broader. American technological leadership, in space and other fields, goes back to its private contracting heritage. Contractors competed to develop tech. They then had an incentive to find other uses for that tech, thereby proliferating its benefits into the broader economy.
It's not a coincidence that while most countries have a tepid public space program, America has multiple launch vehicles under development for a diversity of purposes.
NASA & ESA are not the same as Boeing & Airbus
Launch vehicles are not the same field as "space travel"
Spinning up entities like JPL is a non trivial matter in either civilian or commercial domains.
Spreading the engineering challenges across a wider array of organisations would not expedite their solution imho. Just thin out the available resources.