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Comment by Victerius | Hacker News Reader

I think HN is at least somewhat qualified to speak to the talent side of the issue.

Is this a matter of NASA failing to attract and retain the best engineers because of non-competitive TC? In this case, where are the 10x rocket engineers who would have prevented these problems?

Is this a matter of lost institutional knowledge, where it's been so long these kinds of rockets were launched that the people who knew everything about them died or retired?

Or is this just a matter of a problem being hard to solve, even with the best engineers and the institutional knowledge that comes with decades of experience?

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It's not a problem of engineering talent but of politics.

They made the problem harder to solve by choosing architecture that makes congresscritters happy at the expense of making the rocket way more expensive than it needs to be.

> that makes congresscritters happy

Read: prevents program cancellation

Many politicians don't care about science.

No politicians ignore high paying jobs in their districts.

People throw stones at NASA for optimizing within its system of funding, but it was a fairly brilliant move in the 50s and 60s, and is still a brilliant move today.

Both NASA and SpaceX et al. can be optimal in their own funding landscapes.

That would be true if that's what they were doing. But NASA can't actually optimize the way you suggest. NASA is hard locked in particular architectures and locations. They are not free to make a design and then allocate it to different districts. If NASA could actually optimize like that, they could actually make rational choices, but they can't.

> choosing architecture that makes congresscritters happy at the expense of making the rocket way more expensive than it needs to be

Do you have a source for this "architecture"? Not calling you out, I'm genuinely curious.

EDIT: I found an article about the contractors and how it all got put together, interesting read for those outside of the defense contractors world https://news.clearancejobs.com/2022/08/28/artemis-i-and-the-...

I mean there are lots of resources:

Essentially the Senate in 2011 wrote a bill that mandated NASA to build a rocket by 2016 AND that uses existing contractors. So there was literally no way other then just using exiting Shuttle components to even attempt to do that.

This reddit thread has a lot of resources about the actual design of what SLS ended up being and how the design process clearly suggest to NOT DO what they eventually did: https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceLaunchSystem/comments/kt1vlf/r...

Eric Berger form Ars Technica has lots of articles on the topic, see: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/08/former-nasa-official...

While I was a NASA engineer for the past five years, NASA loved to brag that thousands of businesses from all 50 states of the union have a hand in SLS. It's not popularly known as the Senate Launch System for no reason.

I am not one of those people you describe who is qualified to speak on the talent side of things (although I suspect the hypothetical 10x rocket engineer who would prevent this does not exist). The real answer is quite clear and well documented by the press: This is a matter of NASA being dependent on hiring defense-industry contractors in the districts of key Congressional sponsors for almost all of its funding, rather than making good financial or engineering decisions.

Last time I looked there were a lot of defense contractors on Apollo.

The real answer here is that NASA simple doesn't have the flexibility. The 10x engineers you want should have existed in 1970, because that's where most of the technology was developed.

NASA was forced by congress to put together a large rocket with all existing technology and infrastructure, something they have not done since the 1970s. The last rocket they tried Ares 1 was maybe one of the worst rocket designs ever made and cost an absurd amount of money given its possibilities.

NASA is also hard locked into locations, the NASA Johnson Space Center is politically important and wanted the development. Are the best engineer in that location or in LA where SpaceX put its main engineering efforts.

> Or is this just a matter of a problem being hard to solve, even with the best engineers and the institutional knowledge that comes with decades of experience?

Its a hard to solve problem either way. Made harder by the history and constraints at NASA.

The more relevant question is, should you solve this problem? As Elon Musk often says, are you asking the right question?

That is why for profit rocket company have largely moved away from hydrogen and away from solid rockets.

I doubt NASA paid as good as high finance or MBAs back in the Apollo days

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