Falcon reusability was perfected through lots of explosions in landing attempts, good luck getting NASA or ESA to risk that given how dumb the average taxpayer can be about iterative development like that.
It's even worse than just risk averseness. There was a very telling comment by the CEO of ArianeGroup a few years ago[1] about why they weren't investing in reusable rockets--they were afraid that it would be too efficient, so they would end up laying off workers because they wouldn't have enough demand for new rockets. In the twisted world of government programs efficiency is often seen as a bad thing. Space programs are jobs programs. The SLS program was hamstrung by Congress requiring that it reuse 50-year-old Space shuttle tech because it's a jobs program. Getting to space efficiently isn't even a priority.
More recently ESA has reversed course[2] because SpaceX is eating their lunch, but they're still probably a good decade out from having a reusable rocket, and it's unlikely they would be heading that direction at all if not for the pressure from SpaceX.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/ariane-chief-seems-f...
[2] https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/03/european-leaders-say...
The issue of course was that they were giving into stagnation and assuming that demand wouldn't grow to meet supply, while SpaceX took it the other way and came up with the demand to utilize the supply they had created (also helps that Russia torpedoed its own commercial launch industry and all other providers are stuck in a delayed generational transition, highlighting the unpredictability of demand in the industry).
Now that European launch companies are starting to make progress, perhaps this need for government 'protection' will also go away. It desperately needs to go away in the US since we already have several private companies who've made it to orbit (plus a nearly 20 year tech lead on the rest of the world courtesy SpaceX) and hopefully SLS's obsolete-ness will quickly become too hard to ignore when the Artemis 3 crew is shown transferring from the cramped Orion capsule to the spacious HLS.
I'm not saying this to play up Musk as some philanthropist, but to clarify that it is the government that has benefited from the investment that Musk and other investors have put into SpaceX, rather than the government enriching these investors. Every other rocket made prior to SpaceX, the full development and operation was funded by the government, and the contractors profited immensely, so it is weird to call out SpaceX/Musk for this when they are one of the few exceptions to that rule (along with RocketLab).
But also to point out that SpaceX is a passion project and would likely never have accomplished the things it did if it was run primarily as a profit-making endeavor, or as a utilitarian government project.
To give you an example of why it's a jobs program and not a rocket program. Congress forced NASA to build a multimillion dollar testing facility they never intended to use for the SLS nor for any other rocket NASA has.
Its not like NASA puts out a check and simply waits for the rocket to arrive. With the NASA process, they own the design, they are in meetings on specifications, they requests tests, ect. They micromanage and direct work down to the nuts and bolts, literally and figuratively.
By analogy, they are the head Chef in the kitchen. With SpaceX, they are the customer at the restaurant.
This doesn't compare at all with the SLS, which is just recycling old tech, and even going backwards from the Shuttle in that it gives up on reusability entirely instead of trying to learn and improve from the Shuttle's mistakes.
Calling Falcon Heavy and SLS equivalently government-led is laughable. The amount of by-design government red tape and congressional district handouts is astounding.
Congress cared that it met payload requirements and mission requirements. That these institutions were unable to deliver within reasonable time and budget limits is a result of their own dysfunction.
Since rocket production is extremely capital-intensive, the market is very thin. The number of players capable of even giving it a go is low. And thus, it has all the hallmarks of a typical market failure.
Private companies the entire time could've realized the potential profits and competently worked to achieve them, even outside of begging for government contracts. That they didn't do this for many decades is their own fault.
This is just not correct if you mean that they only cared about payload and mission requirements. Congress mandated that certain technologies were to be used from non-competitive, single-source suppliers in order to prop up industry in particular congressional districts. Cost overruns are practically by-design because as long as it doesn’t raise too many eyebrows it’s just more money to their local industry and constituents.
Now that there is a critical mass of billionaire nerds and venture capitalists who want to build rocket companies, there is now competition in this sector. It is a case of monopoly vs competition. That is the real answer.
SLS follows the old model of NASA contracting where NASA sets all the design requirements and the contractor follows them (ie the choice of solid boosters, the use of Shuttle technology etc was all set by NASA and the final vehicle is owned and operated by NASA). The contractor is effectively given a blueprint and asked to build it, with all construction costs covered.
This is in strong contrast to F9 and FH which follow the new model where the government only sets the rough requirements (payload capacity, target orbits, vibration tolerances etc) but doesn't care about the specific details (beyond making sure that they make technical sense). Payments are made for reaching specific milestones, how that relates to internal costs is entirely on the contractor and the final vehicle is still owned and operated by the contractor, with NASA acting as just another client. It's a much more hands off approach compared to SLS.
This is completely false. SLS was established by Congress with various mandates on the technology and process to design and build it.
Falcon Heavy was not.
Many of the issues with SLS can be traced to Congress's requirements that they put on the project, like forcing it to reuse 50-year-old STS technology.
SpaceX over the last two decades has been a superb illustration of the value of private enterprise.
There are plenty of other threads on HN where you can talk about how much you hate Elon Musk and the like. This is not one of those threads. Just let people enjoy things.
Why the jealousy about people getting good money for good work?
This ruffles the feathers of a certain sort of "space commie", who have traditionally hoped that exploration of space would be impossible for capitalism, leaving space as the great utopia for the future of state-run communism. This was always a dumb point of view, but SpaceX has them particularly upset now because NASA is less involved in the design process than ever before, and it's becoming apparent that capitalism has no trouble getting to space.
If only we could somehow make the public sector hire it's own personnel, pay it well and let it build the rockets instead of feeding either Boeing shareholders or the narcissistic idiot.
Most people convinced of public sector inferiority only perceive the hollowed out and thoroughly corrupted husk left by the neoliberal policies. Mostly because it's been systematically destroyed their whole life and they never noticed.
Or take ESA. They are currently struggling to finish development of Ariane 6. A rocket with tech already obsolete years before it is even ready to fly for the first time.
The crowning achievement of this system was the Apollo program. Which was followed up by the Space Shuttle, a system so expensive and full of compromises that it wasn't really good at much of anything except freezing the state of US space travel at the technological level of 1976 for thirty years.
NASA doesn't design and build its own one-off plane when it needs to send some people to a conference in NYC; they buy them commercial airline tickets. Likewise, purchasing launch services from a commercial provider is far cheaper and more effective than engaging contractors to build a rocket to spec.