NASA – Artemis I Liftoff

For me, personally, flying never gets old.

Predicting decades when it took them only 3 years to go from "nothing" to on the pad is a bit much.

But there is; gold standard for human rated missions is 98% reliability rate. This means testing every single component, and making sure that Product(Px) > 0.98 where Px is the probability failure of component x. This drives the cost up exponentially. E.g. if the rocket has Px = 0.99 and the crew capsule has Pcapsule = 0.99, then Psystem = 0.98, barely clearing the threshold.

Falcon 9 had 3.5 failures out of 185 launches, giving it a Pfalcon9 = 0.98; PfalconHeavy then is,at most, 0.98^3 = 0.84, way too low to make it human-rateabale.

The difference between Procket 0.84 and P0.99 is exponential cost.

The quiet secret is that CCP can bypass a ton of requirements that NASA can’t. That is, until they do something like lose an astronaut and then I suspect they will get much more oversight.

For example, human-rated system usually are a no-go with a single point of failure that can cause a loss of crew. If that does exist, they either need to redesign or get everyone to agree to the new risk assessment.

This decision was entirely due to doctrine. STS was designed as a mostly reusable product and failed costs-wise, so the government basically forced NASA to go with something expendable instead. It is genuinely impressive that SpaceX proved that reusable launch vehicles can be made cost-effective, but it's nowhere near the kind of massive quantum leap that SpaceX's legion of hardcore followers seems to be convinced it is. Everything on a Falcon or a Dragon is public domain 60s technology besides the code and guidance hardware (based on COTS components). The same is likely be true of Starship, which explains a lot of the significant teething issues it has suffered over the past several flight tests.

And this comparison always comes up in the context of "evil inefficient gubmint stealing our tax dollars versus awesome private corporation showing how it should be done".

Lots of the money went into the pockets of tens of thousands of tradesmen and tradeswomen -- welders, fabricators, machinists, NDT technicians, etc -- who further developed their skills, passed it onto newer generations of workers, and ensured manufacturing skills don't become lost to time. The same manufacturing skills that will be used to make the technology and infrastructure we need to continue to live dignified, modern lives.

It went into the pockets of engineers -- who continue on a tradition of engineering established since the first space race. Some of them would have taught and mentored the ones who would go on to make rockets at all the New Space startups, including SpaceX. Others will take their skills to other fields.

It went into the pockets of hundreds of small businesses who contract with the makers of the SLS.

Could we have been wiser with the money? Can we be more effective? Sure. But it is not all for naught and quite frankly if we are to continue as a modern first world society, making sure the skills and tech that go into making a rocket stay alive is just as important as funding healthcare, education and research.

And tonight, there will be some kids inspired by the footage of the most powerful rocket ever made by humans to pursue careers in manufacturing and engineering.

This is not just "creating jobs." This is making sure another piece of a cornerstone of American technological dominance stays alive so we can continue to maintain the standard of living we have now.

$23 billion is a small price to pay. Social media sites have been sold for much more.

Or military. Or political campaigns. Or grift.

> It's good in my opinion to have the conversation.

This conversation has been had to death. NASA gets table scraps anyway. Also this whole program is research, and of the quite practical kind.

> As an aside, I believe "creating jobs" should not be a societal goal.

It's not. It's just something that's being brought up to make the people saying to gut NASA "because education! healthcare!" go away, because it usually resonates with them.

> Making sure everyone can live a dignified life is.

Yes, that's the long-term point of the whole endeavor, and of possible line items on the Federal budget, space historically had quite a good ROI here.

The issue here is that a lot of what NASA does is not driven by current market needs. They're doing speculative, curiosity-driven R&D, on the extreme end of the "exploration" arm of exploration/exploitation tradeoff. Even though evidence to date tells us NASA spending (and space exploration in general) has a huge RoI, and there's good reason to suspect it'll continue to be huge indefinitely, it's not easy to quantify in terms and on time horizons the market understands[0]. NASA having less money just means less R&D being done.

Now, I agree the way they go about things could be improved in terms of efficiency. But, unlike with for-profit companies, budget is the wrong knob to turn. Something else must be changed. I have no idea what[1].

Also, one has to be careful comparing e.g. SpaceX and NASA in terms of costs, because for the former, rocketry is a service they sell. NASA isn't there to be in the business of affordable rocket launches, it's there to be in the business of expanding what's possible.

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[0] - In particular, the market has a really hard time dealing with the idea of work that enriches the society at large - which, from company/investor point of view, is just enriching random third parties.

[1] - In a sense, using money for this in the market economy is a way to side-step figuring out what the problem is - the threat of running out of money makes the companies individually try and do something, and either it works or they die. Obviously, this approach can't work in non-profit R&D.

They've received around $10B[0] in funding. About 3.2B [1] in fed payment, with about $13B, in appropriated funding. I would say they've launched a number of private missions as well that made them a profit.

[0]https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/space-exploration-te... [1]https://www.fpds.gov/ezsearch/search.do?q=spacex+UEI_NAME%3A...