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Comment by bad_good_guy | Hacker News Reader

Isn't a large part of it about keeping people employed in jobs that develop and maintain the skills required to create rockets etc? It's both a job creation program and a national security program to ensure there is a constant source of expertise in the area?

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Creating engineering jobs at NASA would be one thing, but creating jobs at a private contractor is vastly more expensive. That overhead is all about lining well connected people’s pockets.

It’s almost silly how much effort is put into making things as inefficient as possible. The federal government is intentionally given a bad reputation here, but it’s shocking how much more efficient they are internally vs outsourcing stuff.

I had the same feeling. A lot of the things that NASA develops internally are mindblowing (e.g. the Mars rovers or the Casini probe, both developed by JPL), but everything subcontracted to Boeing or Lookeed endup uber delayed and hyper expensive.

If you are honest with yourself, the JPL missions are often insanely expensive.

The Curiosity rover was supposed to be 1.5 billion, but ended up 2.5 billion, and the main explanation of that was 'to develop a new landing mechanism'. Ok, I guess.

And now Perseverance is again 2.5 billion despite large parts of the rover, landing system and so on, were already 95% developed.

Not to mention it took 8+ years from Curiosity to Perseverance.

Space Nerds bitch less about these programs since they at least are successful compared to the human part of NASA but if you really look at the achievement per $ its not that fantastic.

Perseverance has plenty of sub-contracted parts.

For example, Maxar built several components: https://blog.maxar.com/space-infrastructure/2021/inside-pers...

> Not to mention it took 8+ years from Curiosity to Perseverance.

That is because the required orbit window is only once every ... 26? moments or such.

It's also worth noting that technically JPL contracts to NASA... It's actually part of Caltech under contract to NASA rather than a direct NASA organization.

I think it's somehow related to JPL's need to pay investors. Which doesn't exist.

John Carmack, of Armadillo Aerospace fame (and Quake too), once mentioned how they helped some NASA specialists in a project where their flying platform Pixel was involved. John said, that collaboration was the first opportunity for at least some NASA PhDs to actually work with flying hardware - years spent in NASA before that were all about papers.

> years spent in NASA before that were all about papers.

And the development of knowledge Armadillo relied upon.

Unless they developed their own CFD models for their rocket engine.

This would make (some) sense if otherwise these skills were going away, but they very much are not.

If NASA budget were used effectively you would create tons of jobs at the private contractors.

SpaceX and to a lesser extent BO, RelativitySpace, Electron and so on are all working on innovative engine and rockets. At SpaceX they are doing things far more advanced then anything on SLS along pretty much every metric.

This is specifically about employing people in Alabama and Utah.

Creating jobs by employing people to create an overpriced and inferior product at the expense of the taxpayer doesn't work in a capitalistic economy. It's just throwing away talent and stifles any competition that doesn't have MASSIVE financial backing, which is why it's taken so long to have any kind of commercial competition.

That's only true when excluding international trade and specialization.

In the world we live in, it's more often done to ensure some sort of domestic sourcing for national security critical components.

With the alternative not being that competition would spring up here, but that it would spring up there. (For values of there that are not here)

If you mean "isn't a large part of it about shoveling pork barrel money to selected constituencies", then absolutely. For actual skills, SpaceX, Blue Origin etc seem to be keeping rocket scientists employed just fine.

With pork barrel it's the government, through their elected officials, and, therefore, the people themselves, who plan these strategic job creation and maintenance programs.

SpaceX and Boeing don't answer directly to the people.

If that's the case why can't the output of this massive jobs program at least be something comparable to what SpaceX can produce?

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