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Comment by lalos | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to see how NASA has been slowly being privatized via these contracts. People used to be rooting for NASA and now they are rooting for a company that at the end of the day, will do as they please with the technology developed. Americans seem to prefer small government and 'offshore' everything to for-profit companies. In the future, what stops an American company from one day abandoning the USA to another country and leaving the USA without the infrastructure to do space travel anymore? (not familiar if there's regulation in place to stop this?) Or maybe this would just cause the price to rise in the USA for the same services.

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This comment is as misinformed as it gets. This is a DoD contract, NASA is not involved in any capacity. Also NASA never made their own rockets, the fed always decided what rocket NASA will use and awarded contracts to companies on each Senator's state( usually Alabama). That includes the Saturn V, the Space Shuttle etc. NASA provides the requirements and the contractor makes it.

These contracts were on a cost plus basis, meaning the contractor had every reason to delay and ramp up costs. The reason people are cheering SpaceX is because they are promoting cheap rockets and competing on fixed price contracts which have much healthier incentives.

This is also a fixed price contract so it should come as no surprise that SpaceX is competitive here.

Also ITAR is the main legal reason that prevents companies from leaving the USA. Even rocket companies from other allied countries are trying to come to the USA instead of leave it.

That's one thing I don't get. There is a lot of celebration of the shiny new totally private space programs and all, but wasn't the majority of "heavy lifting" always done by private companies like Lockheed and Boeing? Isn't it mostly business as usual, just with a couple of new players in mostly the same game?

The game isn't mostly the same, look at the commercial crew program, Starliner failed in its first demo mission, now Boeing needs to pay for another demo-1 mission from their own pocket (they won't get any extra money for the second demo-1 mission); in the past NASA would have paid for another demo-1 mission.

in other words, they simply got their shit together (making the contractor liable for the actual outcome), plus a couple of new competitors, otherwise things are still ordered by, and directed by the same agencies, no?

It couldn’t be much more different.

Before Congress said let’s buy a suit for a wedding. There was only really one tailor.

Tailor says how much have you got.

Congress says $1 billion but that’s all I’ve got so not a dollar more.

Tailor says ‘sure I can make that work’...

Fast forward, suit is half way done, wedding is tomorrow, tailor says ‘It’s gonna cost your another billion’ or you get nothing. Congress pays and hopes the wife won’t notice. This happens over and over again.

Fast forward to 2020. Finally there’s more than one tailor. Several in fact. The suits are already made and bought off the rack and simply adjusted to fit.

Now congress gets to go shopping and has a range of suits to choose from. Original tailor is in deep shit.

Instead is spending billions on a suit and waiting forever, they pop down to ZOZO and pick one out and pay $100m. What a bargain I’ll take ten.

New tailors in this case - SpaceX, Rocket Lab, Blue Origin in this case.

No, they no longer micro manage the process and tell the contractor how to design the rocket or what processes to use. They provide overall specifications and let the contractor decide how to design the rocket. These days the various agencies just verify / do due diligence rather than design and project management.

Well, yes. The one big change is moving from cost+ contracts to fixed price ones.

Note that doing this is much harder than it sounds, because NASA does not get to decide what kinds of contracts they sign. This is decided by congress, who is still saddling NASA with billion+ dollar cost+ contracts on the SLS rocket.

There are no private space programs, there are private rockets developed using a combination of private funds and fixed cost contracts which means they are cheap. Old space rockets were developed only for gov contracts and they gouged the price as much as possible. SpaceX is efficient with it's rocket development.

Not sure how people are misreading the comment, but in an alternate world NASA would still have the capability to sell this same service to DoD. Since that's not the case, this void has been filled by private companies. Given that info, re-read my comment.

There was such a world. Travel back to 1990, and NASA is selling launch services to DoD via Shuttle. In fact, every other domestic launcher had been shut down to reduce competition on NASA.

It worked out so well (read: sarcasm) that DoD created a program to pay two defense contractors to create essentially-new expendable rockets. Which were hideously expensive, but still less expensive than Shuttle and previous expendable rockets, so this was considered a win. Those two rocket programs were later more-or-less forcibly extracted from their parent companies to become... ULA.

There was a point in the early Space Age where government employees designed rockets: Army Ballistic Missile Agency and Naval Research Lab and such. Basically never were they built in house; even the earliest rockets were actually built by airplane manufacturers. It didn't take long for design to move to private firms, with government specification, insight, and funding. Like pretty much all defense technology, rocket development and manufacture in the US is today all done by private firms. The government often owns the designs, but all the skill and know-how is in the private sector and they can easily make close derivatives on their own or for other customers, if they are allowed and want to do so.

(NASA's SLS is the major departure from this, as the first rocket NASA has ever designed in house--though still built by Boeing and ATK and friends. It's a bunch of Shuttle leftovers that somehow has still cost tens of billions of dollars and counting and is some 5 years behind schedule.)

The point of all this is: the USG isn't handing over the keys to the kingdom of spaceflight to private companies today. They did that in the 1950s and/or never had them in the first place. There's nothing different today except a project and contract structure that better aligns cost incentives, creates competition, and encourages these companies to create a market outside the government.

This is a defense procurement program, NASA is not directly involved.

Claims that NASA is being "privatized" are a bit silly, it has relied on private sector suppliers for it's entire history. The shift from operating it's own rockets (like the Shuttle) is a very good thing and lowers cost through increased competition.

It would be better for NASA to spend money on research (like space probes) instead of operating the actual rockets.

But, to be fair to the OP, NASA has launched classified payloads on the Space Shuttle, and perhaps other rockets. Perhaps the OP is wishing things would go the other way, with all government launches having NASA act as the prime contractor.

NASA isn’t a private company. It’s not selling launches to anyone. It’s also not a good launch system designer, the Space Shuttle may have been the worst operational launch system design in the history of space flight.

NASA is a research and exploration organization. It can buy launches for far less than it would cost NASA to build them. Those savings mean more probes, more manned missions, more science.

The real solution is to have a half dozen or more companies competing in various segments of the launch business, leading to faster technical advancement and lowering costs. And we are getting close to that today. SpaceX, ULA, Electron, Orbital ATK on line now, with Blue Origin and another half dozen on the way.

And this has led to the greatest burst of innovation and economic improvements the launch business has seen since the 1960s. A Falcon 9 can lift almost as much payload as the Shuttle, at a cost forty times lower. We have the first reusable first stages landing themselves, rocket engines being cheaply mass produced on assembly lines, the first operational full flow rocket engine, the first satellite constellations bringing internet access everywhere in the world.

In testing right now is the first truly reusable launch system, which if successful will cut the cost of space access by another ten times, and launch the largest payloads in history.

It will also be used to make in space refueling commonplace, if it succeed in that it lowers the cost of access to the moon, Mars, and other deep space destinations by at least ten times more.

There's nothing wrong with the idea of NASA launching or even owning their own rocket per se.

The problem is always with their bosses, so they always relied on the private sector supplier and contractors instead of using them only when it makes sense.

This is explicitly NASA's strategy, and it is the correct one. NASA wants to be pushing the bleeding edge of possibility in space, and prefers to contract out the "everyday" stuff or orbital flight, in order focus on deep space missions.

The fact that SpaceX is so reliable so quickly is a testament to how great a bet NASA made. The OCO failures come to mind as something that, hopefully, will never happen with SpaceX as a partner. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbiting_Carbon_Observatory#Or...

> It's interesting to see how NASA has been slowly being privatized via these contracts.

It was always my understanding that NASA is a public research institution whose role is to also provide incentives to jump-start areas of the space-based or space-oriented economy. Therefore, one of its main missions is to provide incentives for private companies to conduct research in that domain, such as allowing research programs to be awarded to private companies or consortia including private companies.

ESA works exactly the same way, for instance.

If you look at the Saturn V, Rocketdyne built both the F1 and J2 engines. IBM and Raytheon built the guidance computers. For the Space Shuttle, Rocketdyne built the RS-25, Thikol built the SRBs, and IBM built the AP-101S computer. I'm too lazy to see if NASA built the Saturn V fuel tanks or the Space Shuttle external tank, etc. themselves, but it has been a long time (if ever) since NASA could independently launch spacecraft into orbit.

Sure, NASA used to act as the prime contractor, and now they're outsourcing that role, but the prime contracting capability isn't among the critical capabilities for space flight.

Shuttle tank and S-I body were built at NASA Michoud, but by contractors (Boeing and Martin, respectively.) Boeing today is building the SLS first stage there, as a variant of the Shuttle ET.

Nasa did that simply because they could not get things done, is not the fault of nasa admins nor engeniers, but the corruption of their legacy contractors and congress pushing to do spreed across the country all the projects in order to give jobs in each state, leading to a massive ineficiency that simply was unsustainable. Privately companies already demostrated they can do much more for less.

NASA has always used private firms to design and build practically everything. SpaceX will be constrained by the same things as all the other private aerospace and defense contractors: export control restrictions, domestic production laws, and most importantly the loss--and transition to a domestic rival--of a huge (even primary) customer if that customer should be displeased with their choices.

If SpaceX (or Blue Origin or whatnot) manage to transcend the need for US government money, well, good for them. They just created a huge new swath of economic activity, which is exactly the goal of NASA in supporting commercial services.

In the case of rocket launches specifically, ITAR stops them.

You're confusing NASA launches with the DOD. Totally different thing. Go look at how many things the NRO and its predecessor agencies have put into space with no involvement of NASA over the last 40 years. And all the GPS launches... And things like the geostationary WGS and AEHF satellites. I could write a much, much longer list but that's just a notable few.

I see it as an evolution, what is the NASA mission? It is science, at one point rockets where core to this problem, its not the case any more.

Its better that NASA spends its money on building telescopes and awesome rovers, than space buses.

In the future, what stops an American company from one day abandoning the USA to another country and leaving the USA without the infrastructure to do space travel anymore?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Traffic_in_Arms_...

Thanks

I have recently come to the conclusion that benevolent billionaires operating in a democratic and capitalist society are best way to allocate resources.

NASA

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