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Comment by rob74 | Hacker News Reader

So basically it's one economy of scale (making something bigger means the costs for safety, maintenance, personnel etc. are proportionally lower) vs. another economy of scale (making more of one thing decreases the costs per "unit"). Place your bets...

About your comparison to SpaceX: the approach of building a rocket, launching it, letting it explode and then using the gathered data to make the next one explode later (or not at all) is fine for rockets, but I wouldn't want to see it applied to nuclear reactors.

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I do agree on not letting nuclear reactors explode, but I did use the SpaceX example on purpose. Before SpaceX started to do it, the concept of iterating to that degree on rockets was unthinkable. There was a self reinforcing loop of "rocket launches are expensive, so we must plan for every contingency, so the launch cycle is long and expensive". SpaceX proved that wrong.

I think small modular reactors are the way out of the similar cycle we've got for nuclear reactors. And I think that building a small number of large ones is going to be a lot better if we're also building a large number of small ones and learning.

It's like not building a y houses for 30 years and then building a massive skyscraper. If that's all we do then we'll only ever have one way of building a skyscraper because there's no room to experiment on other construction materials and techniques.

>Before SpaceX started to do it, the concept of iterating to that degree on rockets was unthinkable.

I'm pretty sure that was what NASA was going to do all the way back in the 70s before their funding got slashed. It was a novel idea but not a novel idea that SpaceX was particularly responsible for, just one they threw capital at because the government stopped caring after the space race.

Nuclear power research, by contrast, never really suffered from a lack of available funds. They were throwing money at mini reactors back in the 90s, saying all the same stuff about how mass production would bring down the price.

NASA funding far exceeds SpaceX’s and always has. It shouldn’t take 4% of the US federal budget (NASA funding during Apollo) to run a hardware-rich design process!

Apollo was wound down because the government wanted NASA to focus on the space shuttle and all sorts of other things as well as slashing the total budget by a huge amount.

So, while in theory it may have had the money, in practice it did not.

The Shuttle cost $48 billion to develop in inflation-adjusted dollars — contrast this with the ~$5B spent on Starship development thus far. It’s hard to defend the claim that NASA is or ever has been under-funded.

NASAs "do stuff" budget is super small because their "keep all the experts on staff" budget is insatiable.

It's not entirely bad though, I'm sure lots of those folks are doing good and important stuff. But I don't think the balance between employment and building things is quite right. At least to my tastes.

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