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Comment by pixl97 | Hacker News Reader

Life critical software that gets visibility by congress tends to be a very bureaucratic process. Your boss doesn't want your commit being the one that causes a worldwide diplomatic issue.

I assume that smaller/cheaper drones avoid a lot of this because the stakes aren't near as high and quite a bit of the development occurs in private industry first.

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> visibility by congress tends to be a very bureaucratic process

See also SpaceX vs. NASA. No way would NASA have been allowed to blow up as many rockets as SpaceX did to finally get to their working solution.

Yeah, the anti-regulation people when NASA experiments: "look at all these failures! Cut NASA funding and give public funds to the guy who purchases elections!"

The same people when SpaceX blows up a bunch of rockets: "wow, look at the innovation, they move so fast! Cut NASA funding and give public funds to the guy who purchases elections!"

NASA's failures as of late are less "dramatic explosions" and more "delays", "cost overruns" and "lack of ambition so severe it borders on criminal".

The last time NASA caught any serious flak was what, the Starliner shitshow? And that was just splash damage from Boeing getting dunked on by everyone at once.

> lack of ambition so severe it borders on criminal

I'm not sure what timeline you're thinking about, but JWST was launched pretty recently and it's pretty ambitious. But more to the point of my earlier post, NASA's "lack of ambition" is probably directly attributable to the "small government" people who penalize ambition in the public sector and praise it in the private, government contractor sector. The incentives to be ambitious in government are perverse when every "failure" is scrutinized and condemned by people who want government to fail so that they can justify taking public money and dumping it into private bank accounts.

A big part of the reason for useless Gateway was that NASA wanted post-ISS missions, but was too afraid to roll with a permanent Moon base instead. The other big part was that Orion sucked, and somehow, neither "get Orion to suck less" nor "roll with Orion, provision for HLS to do more" was in the cards. This only changed under Isaacman.

For every Curiosity and JWST, there's ARM and Artemis. It seems like it's getting better now, but very slowly.

This is kind of an odd reply as what is going on now is exactly what one would expect from a culture that cannot take risks at all.

1. Something blows up.

2. It gets pasted all over the news.

3. People wonder why we give NASA money to blow stuff up

4. Congress people with room temperature IQs grill NASA admin for months.

5. NASA becomes risk adverse.

6. Today.

NASA had real safety issues in the past - Space Shuttle is a testament to that. But if this is the fix, they clearly overcorrected.

There's some sort of happy middle ground between flying a ship that has a very significant chance of a catastrophic failure killing all crew and can't even fly unmanned, and almost not letting Ingenuity fly because the chance of failure was deemed too great. NASA didn't find it.

I would guess that DoD procurement rules have more to do with it than Congress, but perhaps Congress defined DoD procurement rules.

Milspec is expensive and process heavy, see what a B52 replacement trash can costs, for just one example.

If you think Milspec is expensive, you should see the cost of not having a Milspec supply chain while still being risk-averse.

We could always be less risk averse. We still seem to kill civilians at high rates and our own soldiers signed up to die. Gold-plated weapons aren't much good against peer powers anyway; it's production volume that wins those wars.

That’s a damn good point, probably more costly and more of a hassle to adopt off-the-shelf products to work reliably in a military environment while minimizing risk.

DoD procurement rules are largely the outcome of Congress trying to prevent executive-industry corruption through mandated process.

But aren't the politicians also corrupt? (or at least most of them) One therefore assumes that any action by congress must be corrupt. This appears borne out by the evidence over the past few decades.

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