The US is actively choosing to become completely reliant on private providers for access to space, which at this point boils down to SpaceX and Boeing. Both seem unreliable for different reasons. I just cannot see it as anything else than a blunder.
Single vendor commercial rockets are a recent (2000s) invention.
Using your analogy, if I do hire a contractor I'll talk with them a lot about what they're going to do and make sure it's generally in line with what I want, but they're generating most of the ideas and just incorporating what I say.
There were instances where NASA engineers brought up issues with designs and were told it wasn’t their role to drive the design. The concept of CCP was they were buying a ride, not a rocket. Just like you don’t tell Airbus what engine they should use when you buy a plane ticket.
* IMO the goal of CCP was to find a mechanism to informally circumvent many requirements. NASA could always waive requirements but I don’t think many people were willing to sign on the dotted line even if they disagreed with the requirements. CCP unburdens them from the same requirements while also allowing them to avoid full responsibility for the decision. (More charitably, it also allowed them to avoid some political costs, like having to spread projects across multiple political areas to avoid funding cuts.)
Again, you don't want two different organizations trying to design one thing.
I personally think we need at least a second reliable launch provider, probably rocket lab, just for redundancy.
What are you saying?
Where we see waste in government is in big, entrenched, dinosaurs where competition is very difficult and/or limited. What we need is a little more free market capitalism in those areas. Greed is not the driver of waste imo, incompetence is a far bigger contributor.
If you'd like to make tangible arguments instead of vaguely ranting against capitalism then I'm all ears.
Edit: also the multi-billion dollar compensation package was in stock, so it didn't actually waste any money
Edit 2: by the way you're still dodging my original legitimate question about what the government has ever actually built without private contractors. There are real answers to that question and if you are such a big proponent of the government building things themselves maybe you should know something about them.
I never said that the government should never use private contractors (always need janitorial services), but when tax dollars are being used to fund technology and research, the government should never cede ownership of those outputs to private business.
Idk, call me crazy but I saw that post and never believed it would actually happen. Call me when something of that magnitude does.
No tweets as sources.
Space X is literally the best in commercial space right now and its not even close, and they already have starlink which basically cash cow that if somehow US cut off spacex
they would just fine, they lost funding sure but they would happy to take foreign customer
It should be SpaceX, Rocket Lab, and Blue Origin, and maybe soon Stoke Space.
Boeing has been on the same path to decline as old GE was for decades.