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Comment by econgeeker | Hacker News Reader

So, am I to understand that your position is that NASA is efficient in its spending, and that this who think governments are inefficient (cost wise) at achieving goals are caught up in a "media-hype" that is "antigovernment"?

If that is correct, how were SpaceX and Scaled Composites able to do so much with such limited resources?

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while i admire Musk, lets look soberly at the things, credit due where credit due. SpaceX and Scaled Composites did nothing technologically new. They took old (50 years old) well developed approaches and reimplemented them efficiently. This is exactly what business is good at - to take a developed (at great expense, usually on huge government dime) solution to a complex problem and productize it, cost efficiently and thus making it widely available (coincidentally a thing that government isn't good at, and it is only logical that NASA was able to develop such complex, pioneering design like Shuttle - huge success in that regard and wasn't able to make it useful anywhere close to commercial scale - huge and not surprising failure in that regard)

Indeed, how were SpaceX and Scaled Composites able to do so much with such limited resources, 30 years later and having benefited immensely from NASA's pioneering work?

NASA could definitely be run better but let's compare apples to apples. I'm sure any given engineer at SpaceX has a computer on his desk superior to the entire world's computational capacity at the time the shuttle was designed.

I think its disingenuous to say that.

People are not comparing SpaceX of today to NASA of 30 years ago.

They're comparing contemporary NASA to contemporary SpaceX and finding NASA is lacking.

NASA could also be compared to the Russian program and found lacking. And the Russians still have an ability to put things into space, while the US now doesn't.

They didn't have to build components at factories in 50 different states.

They didn't have to include secret USAF, CIA, AAA etc requirements in the design.

They had a simple goal - get payload to LEO cheaply - not a nebulous goal of 'make America look good in space'

I believe you are confusing NASA, the government organization that is beholden to ~500 representatives and 100 senators, with some other nebulous corporation that does scientific space research.

They did have to build components. Want to know why the shuttle (actually all space missions) took off in florida, were controlled in Alabama, and landed in California. Senators from Alabama, California, and Florida wrote their tender that way.

There is secret then there is ITAR. A lot of astromechanics, guidance and tracking is still under the control of the DOD. They'd have a hard time not going through them.

Goals, just like the, now, International Space Station have a ways of changing. The US thought they could build a permanently manned space station by themselves and even that proved too much.

I think "they" meant SpaceX, not NASA.

Besides, you are incorrect: Atlantis just landed back in Florida, as did most of the shuttles. CA was just the backup landing site, and they often waited a day for weather in Florida to be good rather than land in CA to avoid the hassle of transporting the shuttle cross-country.

Check your history. California Edwards AFB was the backup landing site but became the primary landing site for most of the early years of the program. A runway was built and maintained in Florida but never used until the 90s.

According to wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle_Landing_Facility, the runway was too good at its job and ended up breaking landing gear. So they spent 6 years sanding it down. But when I was a kid and asked why they landed all the way over there, someone at NASA told me it was the unpredictable Florida weather.

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