You can adopt modern safety standards and still wipeout a ton of roadblocks to actually get started much sooner by just generally using eminent domain more freely and not empowering people to so easily stop projects with lawsuits.
The way he described it, he was contracted to describe the problem and provide guidance on how to fix it. Not to actually fix, just analyse and describe the solution. But the problem was so simple he just made the fix and offered to do it there and then. They didn’t accept that, they insisted on getting a report and steps to fix. So he does that. He sends them a document and doesn’t hear from them for a while.
Six months later, he gets an email “Can you please come over to discuss your findings?” The “discuss your findings meeting” he describes as being easily a £100.000 meeting.
All this could have been avoided if they just did the fix there and then. But there is a culture a bureaucracy and ass covering.
I have no doubt, this sort of thing is prevalent in other industries as well. It’s not always reasonable safety regulations. Often times it’s bureaucracy running in circles and driving up costs for no reason .
Chalking this up to pointless bureaucracy is in a sense the inverse of the “build it like that but six inches to the left” class of requests from non-technical stakeholders.
The flip side of that is monopoly. The only recent aviation accidents that have happened, have done so because, put bluntly, the FAA knows they didn't stand a chance if they blocked the only (US) big-jet maker from upgrading its planes. Were there (US) competitors, which once there were, they wouldn't blink at telling Boeing's transparently awful MAX design to go whistle.
In an ideal world Boeing would have said this is the Max, it's slightly different and you need to do a little training to get used to the difference. But that means a new type rating which causes all sorts of operational headaches.
Isn't airlines one of the worst performing industries, with companies which often require subsidies, and are always on the verge of collapsing?
And that has been this way, way before Covid...
It suggested no methods of preserving safety while also removing unnecessary roadblocks. It just suggested we should live with the "discomfort". I don't even think the author necessarily intended that. It reads to me as a combination of tunnel vision and poor communication. But the result is that the article comes off as mis-informed.
The Artemis(/SLS) gets build in so many different states so everyone gets a bit of the pie, it seems mostly build by politicians, not by engineers or a general director.
Starship, which is similarly powerful and has more tonnage to carry only costs $240 million, which numbers will drop steeply if we do a lot of launches.
But I think your point is both correct and missing something. It's true that NASA is largely run by politicians (it's no accident that there are NASA Centers in major political states like Florida, Texas, Ohio, California, and Virginia). But conversely, there would be no SpaceX in it's modern form without NASA. They needed a customer willing to take a risk with big contracts on non-profitable ventures to initially fund their infrastructure and R&D. Their existence is symbiotic.
It’s an interesting cycle and perhaps research to see how these things effect eachother?
NASA's implementation of different Center's actually addresses a risk that SpaceX doesn't have to necessarily consider (or at least to the same magnitude). Namely, it's meant to address political risk. NASA's missions almost always span multiple administrations, meaning they risk being defunded each election cycle. This is mitigated by spreading the political reward across multiple districts, who then have politicians with a vested interest in keeping those programs going. The downside of this is a lack of efficiency. Unlike SpaceX, NASA can't build up a single location to build and test rockets. If they did, there would be two Senators who want to keep it and likely 48 others who want it defunded in order to fund their own pet programs. So we have programs managed out of Ohio, tested in New Mexico, Mississippi, and California, funded out of Texas, and launched out of Florida.
I'd argue they aren't "risk adverse", but they mitigate a different set of risks. In any event, SpaceX can't be "disruptive" without the complicit help of the organization they are disrupting. It isn't really disruption, but a symbiotic relationship as intended. SpaceX actually gets to outsource a lot of their risk to the American taxpayer because their early (and major) customer (NASA) is self-insured. It's much easier to take on a lot of risk if somebody else is footing the bill.
I think a major risk to SpaceX that people don't really talk about is the bureaucratic quality risk. Right now, SpaceX doesn't have to meet the same requirements as an in-house NASA build. That allows them to streamline their efforts, but also implies an increase in risk. (Most requirements are a response to some risk). However, if any bad event happens like god-forbid they lose astronauts, you can bet additional requirements will be levied. This may really impact their "disruptive" advantage. Look at the example of their F9 strut failing in 2015. For some reason, SpaceX didn't levy supplier quality checks prior to the accident even though it's common practice in industry. Now, they do. The real question is if they were making risk informed decisions previously or just naïve.