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Comment by reactordev | Hacker News Reader

Anytime you have subcontractors of the subcontractor of the prime contract holder, you’re going to get construction projects that go 20 years. It’s totally a jobs program. Job security and predictable pay outs.

The entire space coast of Florida was built on this, from Kennedy Space Center down to Jupiter, FL.

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Beyond FL, they’re careful to make sure parts of the rocket at built in EVERY state! Now something that should be cutting edge innovation is tied to Congress which is intentionally not innovative and you wonder why it falls behind.

There's that but also NASA gets continually screwed with, the moon return mission changed scope every 8 or so years when a new president came in and wanted to put their own stamp on the project to claim it for themselves.

It's slightly less cynical than that - it takes about eight years to design a space mission and rocket, but doing the detailed design is expensive as hell, so in order to meet a budget, they then change the mission, so they can go back to the vastly more affordable task of talking about doing work, vs doing work

Even if it would work out to distribute the pork across the continent, the fact is that all this splitting introduces logistical cost (shipping) as well as development costs (red tape needed to approve any change). SpaceX doesn't have any of that crap, and Tesla (with its famous ditching of the old school "auto makers and parts suppliers" ecosystem) either.

One of the stipulations for SpaceX to even have contracts was they had to support the space coast. They do. Launches from Kennedy are frequent and the drone platform the rockets land on are stationed there. SpaceX is the new NASA and like you said, they don’t have the red tape of having to justify parts manufacturing across the states.

The sad reality is in the US, too many towns were built around a very specific and niche business. Coal in the Appalachian mountains, NASA and the space coast, Pittsburgh Steel… it’s a community plan that failed and yet is still being used today. Woe to those that move/live there.

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