Comment by alfalfasprout | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alfalfasprout | Hacker News Reader

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But the reality is that competition really does drive innovation.

In the past few years we've seen SpaceX get reusable boosters working, a mission to the ISS, etc. Though people like to diminish blue origin's accomplishments due to not hitting orbit they were able to land their reusable booster on the first try too.

In a short amount of time we've seen tremendous progress in bringing down the costs of launching. It's frankly inconceivable NASA would do the same.

I have a few friends that have spent years at JPL and the amount of bureaucracy, waste, and red tape they had to deal with all went away when they started working at SpaceX and then Blue Origin.

The fundamental problem is that NASA's funding is tied to politics and not a business model. Both Democrats and Republicans gutted NASA over the last 15 years and essentially killed any chance we had at even launching basic rockets. The SLS was the last serious project NASA tackled and it was shuttered.

Private space exploration has brought us innovation at a pace NASA could have never delivered because it always had to be pessimistic and scared of funding cuts if anything ever failed.

SpaceX raised about 6 billion in total, NASAs budget is 23 Billion/Year -- why did NASA lose the ability to get people to space?

You can blame whatever you want, but at the end of the day - they're failing.

Didn't they just land a robot on mars? Maybe they aren't failing but have different priorities. People marvel that SpaceX docks with the ISS but the existence of the ISS and the people on it is taken for granted at this point. How did they get there before SpaceX?

Space Shuttle and then Soyuz.

>It's frankly inconceivable NASA would do the same.

It's only inconceivable because we refuse to fully fund NASA.

NASA has so many entrenched issues from being a primarily political organization. even if you fully funded them, I wouldn’t expect the level of innovation as elsewhere.

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