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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

I'm saying that the bill for NASA doing it would be 10x what a free market operation could do it for.

It's not too expensive for governments to do it, and it doesn't have to be private enterprise. Neither of those things are true. Nor is it even clear that it would be cheaper to contract with some private provider to boost the ISS than for the space agencies to figure it out themselves with the launch vehicles they have. How do you think NASA, ESA, etc build rockets anyway? They contract with Lockheed, Boeing, Airbus, Northrop, and others to build them. Having the whole operation be under the auspices of SpaceX doesn't do much other than make other governments more reluctant to help fund it.

Government contracting is not at all indicative of how the free market works.

Also, the free market would never have built a design like the space shuttle. Pushing very heavy wings and landing gear into space doesn't make sense and never did.

It was actually the side-mount design that made the least sense. It left the heatshield completely exposed to ice and insulation strikes.

To be fair, the magnitude of that risk was not realized in the design phase. Though one could hardly miss the giant, heavy wings & landing gear and the heavy structure to support it. That was obvious to me at the time, and I often wondered why no article about the shuttle ever mentioned it.

Musk figured out a far better way to make a reusable rocket. All it needs is a bit of extra fuel that is burned at the last second.

(Playing the Lunar Lander game in college, I soon realized that the minimum fuel burn to land it was to fall ballistically and go to full power as late as possible, hitting 0 fps just as one touched down.)

Could they have mounted 2 space shuttles, bottom to bottom, instead?

Where the 2nd space shuttle was the fuel tank, and it lands somewhere down range, and is then transported back to the launch center by barge.

Yes, a crewed fuel tank was one of the designs considered, as was three shuttles (2 crewed tanks + 1 ship) in a triangle. Visit the Udvar-Hazy Air & Space Museum Annex in Virginia if you ever get a chance, there’s an exhibit on all the proposed designs. We got the worst possible one.

Another set of heavy wings and landing gear to push up.

In 2021, the cheapest and most reliable way to send a man to space is to use a Soyuz, for a cost of 19-22 million dollars per person. This is of course a communist design launched by a public space agency built by a majority public ownership factory.

I think it might be time to accept that in these cases its pretty often not the inherent efficiency of the free market - which can often be less efficient than alternatives - but the ineptitude of the US government and it's agencies as far as doing things efficiently.

There are US politicians and functionaries that admitted publicly that they made the government less efficient for ideological reasons to make the free market look better.

> 19-22 million dollars per person

That doesn't mean it was profitable. The price could have been set for political reasons. Or it could have been set by the marginal cost of the launch, ignoring entirely the development cost that was written off when the USSR collapsed. Or it could have been enough to simply pay for the weight of the astronaut in a rocket that was going up anyway, like a hotel will sell rooms at a deep discount just to not lose as much money if it cannot otherwise. If communism produces goods and services cheaper than the free market, we'd be awash in Soviet goods.

The US government produces goods and services at "cheap" prices, but the losses are made up for by the taxpayer.

> which can often be less efficient than alternatives

I'd like to see a case of that.

> If communism produces goods and services cheaper than the free market, we'd be awash in Soviet goods.

Which we aren't, because they're undercut by Chinese goods...

No. Communism and planned economy are not capable of producing consumer goods. Source: I actually lived in the USSR.

Anecdotal evidence isn’t evidence. They’re capable, what they lack(ed) is the creativity to do so.

You mean my whole youth lived around Soviet-made goods is an 'anecdotal evidence'?

Well, perhaps I should have tried living in those fantasy Soviet Unions some people on the internet love so much. Those must have been magnificent states!

Well, it does remain anecdotal evidence. The point of the above commenter is that while they could be made the lack of creativity in planned economies lead to them not being made, not that there were made.

You talk about planned economy shows that you learned about it from third-party sources. There was an abundance of creativity, it just wasn't aimed at creating consumer goods, because they just could not be made in the planned economy at all.

That might very well be true, I'm just trying to iron-man their argument. Do you have some sources about that and why that is?

Yes what you present is anecdotal evidence. Also nobody is saying they like the Soviet Union that is an idiotic strawman. My point is that they could be made but the USSR wasn’t gearing its economy towards consumer goods because it was a military state who cared almost entirely about heavy industry to benefit its military industrial complex and competition with the US.

The US free economy produced a better military and plenty of high quality consumer goods.

While that is true, the USSR produced a better military and more, higher quality consumer goods than most nations of it's size.

That said, it is certain that the soviet system was suboptimal in a great many ways.

But, crucially to the fact at hands, 1960s' USSR produced better rockets to send people to the ISS, at a lower cost, than 2021's USA, so there something beyond the free market in this particular case.

Government contracting is not indicative of a free market.

I'm sorry, what else are you suggesting? That we let the free market figure out by itself how to maintain the ISS without signing any government contract?

Also, Falcon 9 wasn't the product of a government contract.

I’m not arguing the US isn’t a better system. I’m saying had the USSR decided to allocate its resources towards consumer goods, it’s ridiculous to think they couldn’t have had a large industry.

It's ridiculous to think that that could produce anything good for consumers. The system just didn't work towards that goal. You can't design a fashionable piece of clothing if you have a 5 year plan imposed on you.

They weren’t even capable to FEED and clothe their people. The queues and lack of everything was legendary.

Source: another anecdotal evidence, my youth lived under the horror of communism.

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