Governments have long held this information close to their chests. NASA, in particular, has never published accounting on what the Space Shuttle really costs, since this information would help a competitor (Russians, Chinese, etc.) build a similar vehicle with better economics.
Space-X has a single goal - lift 1000Kg up 500km cheaply.
The space shuttle had a million competing goals - from the airforce who wanted a certain glide slope, senators that wanted bits built in their home state, Presidents that wanted a launch on the day of a press conference, scientists that wanted a platform for different experiments, Astronauts that wanted justification for crewed vessels. And of course Nasa that needed to find budgets to keep 'N' Apollo era people employed.
It not only has to fly different obsolete aircraft. It has to fly it's biggest most expensive ones empty to a distant foreign country because of 'political links', it has to fly uneconomic routes to distant outposts, it can never fire anyone, it has to keep large fleets on standby for vague secret military purposes, it has to show huge losses on projects to hide military black-projects or subsidies to commercial aircraft makers.
And that's just assuming Nasa is otherwise perfectly competent and efficent.
No I'm not bitter - I jut worked on Hubble for a Nasa 'partner'.
Please elaborate. What are your sources for this?
What Space X is a good example of is the very effective model we have here in the US of doing innovation. Government funds fundamental R&D, then private industry commercializes it. It's a healthy synergy that you see throughout the sector.
You missed the one goal that was in the forefront of all others:
Justify a large budget / keep the permanent bureaucracy employed.
Elon doesn't care about this.
In the government sector labor force size is a BENEFIT.
In the private sector it's a COST.
That is why private sectors of the economy deliver more and more value relative to the number of people employed over time (farming, publishing, software, hardware) and why government dominated sectors move in the opposite direction (the only sectors to gain headcount in the recession are education, healthcare, and government).
As far as delivering more value, a lot of economies of scale are thanks to technological advances. A lot of technological advances can be credited to expensive governmental programs that were springboards the private sector was later able to launch off of.
You read a WHOLE lot in there.
Look at the point that I actually made, and JUST that point:
In Government, headcount is a (political, organization, etc.) benefit.
In industry it is a cost.
It's a cost to the shareholder. To every layer of management from the shopfloor foreman to the board it's a benefit.
There are actually a lot of companies with more than 100.000 employees... I think it's just natural that there aren't more... you need a very big market for them
At the management level, the manager -- who bears no personal cost for managing N+1 workers instead of just N workers, will almost always choose N+1 if given the option. He doesn't pay their salaries, after all, and to him, the increased headcount is a status symbol. It's also something he will convince himself he actually needs. (You never hear middle managers complaining that their divisons are overstaffed, but the opposite complaint is almost universal).
This is what's known as an "agency problem." Many (most?) of the agents of the greater whole (the company) have personal incentives that work at odds with the company's greater incentives. This clash of incentives leads to waste, bloat, inefficiency, and so forth, because almost nobody is personally on the hook for the company's total health in the long run. (Sure, they're indirectly on the hook. If the company starts doing poorly, they could risk losing their jobs. But people tend to externalize failure, and don't hold themselves personally responsible).
I do not know if you are familiar with how big companies work, but usually when you reach a large enough size, such companies start to track "productivity indexes" between their departments and against competition, when comparison is available. SUch an index would look like = sales of the department / headcount of that department, which basically gives you an "average value" of an employee in that department. Then in order to prove that you need additional headcounts, you need to have a high productivity index in the first place to justify it. So that's why big companies don't just keep growing forever: they start to become more efficiency-sensitive, and consider carefully the cost of an employee versus the actual benefit to have more.
Personal anecdote. A company I worked for fired the more costly tech support staff right before an important partner product launch which left a bunch of undertrained customer service reps supporting the new product which gave a bad experience to customers. It also irritated the partner because the training the reps received essentially told them that almost any problem needed to be referred to the partner, swamping them with customers wanting them to fix a problem that wasn't theirs. They then had to scramble & rehire a tech support staff.
Take Intel's Itanium project which has struggled on for 16 years, yet Intel still has resources devoted to it. Sometimes you cannot just kill a very unsuccessful project & it can take many many years to wind it down.
You could also look at any need for layoffs as being a miscalculation by the company. When Yahoo announces 2000 layoffs, does that mean they're being efficient by cutting staff or does it mean that they've had 2000 employees on staff that shouldn't have been there in the first place & for how long? Why didn't the indexes and metrics in place tell them to not hire these people?
Also the government is not immune to layoffs. They have actually been one of the top organizations laying people off over the last few years.
I don't understand this claim. You state it like it's well-known fact. In what (evidenced) ways is headcount advantageous in government and not in business? Using headcount as a proxy for importance/value when rewarding middle managers is common in many organizations.
And it's the same in private industry.
Can be said for the private sector as well. Unless you think the private sector is growth averse.
>In industry it is a cost.
Governmental employees are not free.
You also made other points as well such as the #1 goal of the Space Shuttle program was to keep bureaucrats employed & that the private sector is more efficient regarding the value it creates per employee.
http://www.dwp.gov.uk/policy/welfare-reform/legislation-and-...
"Building Britain’s Recovery: Achieving Full Employment", published on 15 December 2009, restates the Government’s response to the recession and signals the start of the programme to return to full employment.
Incidentally, I never understood why Thatcher was evil for not subsidizing the loss-making mines, and modern politicians are evil for subsidizing loss-making banks (i.e. RBS).
Some view Thatcher destroyed the industry not only because it was unprofitable but also as an attack against the unions, supposedly going so far as to shutdown even profitable mines or those that had potential. Putting 180,000+ out of work is going to cause some outrage from those you are putting out of work & the surrounding communities that relied on those wages. Also some may view domestic energy production as a valuable asset to retain even if it is not market viable just due to energy security/independence concerns.
As far as the bank comparison, I think some people have a kinder view towards the plight of a coal miner working in dangerous conditions for not a lot of pay vs the plight of an executive banker raking in massive bonuses while tanking the economy.
I'm not supporting government waste, but the way. Efficiency should be the goal, but you obviously have NO idea what you are talking about.
That would suggest that the solution for unemployment is to simply give all unemployed people public sector jobs - which doesn't sound like a very good idea to me.
It's a mixed bag. Some economists claimed it helped others claim it lengthened and made the recession deeper.
- The taxpayer paid the wage (the same as jobseeker's allowance, I think). The private companies didn't pay anything.
- Companies could just sack their workers and enjoy the benefits of free labour.
So much for the minimum wage! How can minimum-wage workers compete with free labour? (Free from the company's perspective, that is.) And this was supposed to reduce unemployment?!
And anyway, if people are working, why aren't they getting minimum wage?
Yeah, it worked very well in Russia and East Germany. So well people were risking their lives to go somewhere else for better opportunities. And if North-Koreans could get out of their country, I'm sure they would be happy witnesses of a full-employment state policy.
You obviously have NO idea what you are talking about.
Of course, what goods/services should be guaranteed and what the value of X should be for each one is and will remain an open problem.
>> Can be said for the private sector as well. Unless you think the private sector is growth averse.
Huh? Employees aren't growth. Employees may be necessary to accomplish/support growth, but that's very different. The difference is that a biz will happily take growth with no employees and will try to avoid employees with no growth.
Of course judging a company based only on it's headcount is silly, just like judging that the government must be wasteful and inefficient because of it's headcount.
Unless you're claiming that everything import is growth....
Sometimes it seams to be the ways enterprise software is written and implemented.
It's about as 'commercial' as Ariane
NASAs project management wasn't that bad in the beginning, Apollowas pretty successfull, wasn't it? Afterwards it somewhat declined.
Not that the Europeans are any better as of late, Ariane for example is not a landmark of efficiency.
This is not true, at least for government which has cut jobs in the last four years.
Instead Nasa was told - get a man to the moon before the decade is out. But it was also told build something in Houston to keep senator X happy; stick a few $Billion to Boeing they are having a hard time; keep a few SR-71s flying in case we have another war in the gulf; make sure the Shuttle can get to a polar orbit from Edwards without overflying foreign territory; buy the mirror from P-E because we need to keep Keyhole alive till the next funding cycle. And a hundred other 'tasks'
And that's before the inevitable internal bureaucracy kicks in
Imagine being able to order a satellite launch from a rocket company's web site. Select payload type. Select orbit. Select date and time. Checkout with Mark Zuckerberg's credit card.
Competition is actually a good thing sometimes.
You haven't learned your lesson from the last 20 years.
There are no more "European markets for space launch" and "American markets for space launch" than there are "European markets for database products".
People compete globally.
The only reason that someone in China or France wouldn't prefer the use the best quality / lowest cost supplier is if their local government gets involved and distorts the marketplace via either taxation or regulation.
If you want an accelerated view of what I was imagining, consider this: say SpaceX is wildly successful. Ten years from now, they have not only fulfilled all of their existing NASA contracts but they've also made huge advancements towards bringing all sorts of payloads to and from the ISS and maybe the moon, whatever. They could offer their services to any highest bidder, or, as a US company, could continue to cut deals with the government that they pay taxes to and bias all of their business in its favor. Their profits will not suffer because there will likely be similar ventures in other countries, and all in all it will be very similar to space exploration at the height of its frenzy, before everyone got all chummy with common goals for humanity and whatnot. I wish I could type this faster and more clearly but I've got to run– I hope you get my point though (even if you disagree).
Also, if the US wants to buy an aerial refueling aircraft, they are more likely to choose Boeing than Airbus. And of course its the other way around, too.
So these are two different markets. For products, but also for engineer recruiting.
Do you think the Air Force would launch recon satellites on a Chinese rocket? How about the X37B?
Granted, there is also a sizable international market for purely commercial launches.